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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/smalltownmanOOaust 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 


Books by Mary Austin 





A Smatyt Town Man 

Lost BorpERS 

Santa Lucia 

Tuo Lanp or Lirrite Raw 
Is1pRO 

Tue Basket Woman 

Tue Fiock 

Tus Arrow MAKER 

Curist IN ITALY 

Tue GREEN Bovuau 

A Woman or GENIUS 

Tue Lovety Lapy 

Tue LAND oF THE SUN 
Love AND THE Sout-MAKER 
Tue Forp 

26 JAYNE STREET 

Tue AMERICAN Ruyrum 
Tue Lanp or JouRNEY’s Enpine 


{oO } 


' bit os iv do 


MAN 


BY 
MARY AUSTIN 





HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 


A Smatu Town Man 





Copyright, 1915 and 1925 
By Harper & Brothers 
Printed in the U.S. A. 





E-Z 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE 


In March of 1915, when the original manuscript 
was first presented to the publishers, it bore the title 
of A Small’ Town Man under which it is now reissued. 
But, on the ground that such a title would be so little 
appreciated by the public as to prejudice them 
against the material of the book, the publishers so 
strongly, and perhaps wisely, advised against its use 
that the author was constrained to agree with them. 
Accordingly, the first edition, as well as the serial 
publication of the story in the North American — 
Review, appeared under the caption The Man Jesus. 

There was also in that first edition something 
which has been a sore point of conscience with the 
author ever since. That was a final chapter in 
which the author’s conclusion about the man was 
held in abeyance, and an attempt made to suggest 
what were believed to be the lasting values of the 
Life, by an interpretation of the less important 
teachings. At that time it was thought by my 
advisers that the very terms of mysticism and 
genius were so little understood by American 
readers, that the point of my real conclusions would 


be entirely missed. In this I concurred, but with 
Vv 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE 


the reservation that, if at any time in the future I 
felt that an estimate of Jesus as a mystic would be 
appreciated, the book was to be revised and re- 
issued. Both author and publisher now agreeing that 
a more general familiarity with the terms and scope 
of mysticism, will warrant a restatement of the 
claims of Jesus to be considered, although a small- 
town man, the greatest of mystics, this new edition 
has been undertaken. 

It was at Rome, in the summer of 1907, that I 
began to be interested in the man, Jesus, since it was 
there that I first realized how completely we had 
lost him. I had gone directly to Italy from a hot, 
tawny land, where shepherds watched their flocks, 
where the fields were watered by led streams and the 
hills terraced with vines and olives. I had lived in 
small towns and smaller, had known dark peoples 
whose wisdom was all of the inner understanding, 
among whom prophets and natural leaders were of 
normal occurrence. And I had counted on that 
background, so like to the one to which Jesus was 
native, to put me directly in the way which I sup- 
posed would lead back from the Church of Rome 
to the man in whose name it was established. But 
what I found at Rome was so alien to my expectations 
that, without the starred references in the guide 
books, I wouldn’t have identified it. 


Jesus was not there for me in Roman art, as the 
vi 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE 


fifteenth century had painted him; in death so de- 
plorable, in life so wan and womanish, so elegant; 
nor was he anywhere to be discovered in the pomp 
of ritual nor the bemused, Greco-Roman mysticism 
of worship. So then and there in the catacombs, in 
the library of the Vatican, and later in other great 
libraries, wherever there were original texts and con- 
firming material, I began to look for the plain man 
who was the vehicle of his revelation. I looked for 
him by the one method in the technique of which I 
had some mastery, the method of the folklorist, with 
precisely the same frame of mind in which I ap- 
_ proached any other collection of hero tales. Here, I 
said, was a man who produced an impression on his 
own and succeeding ages such as no man else has left, 
a small-town man,whose life and sayings are reported 
by his fellow-townsmen. In this material I should be 
much at home. 

It will readily be seen that the item about Jesus 
which furnishes the title of this revised edition, is also 
the one which affords the closest point of contact for 
the average modern, himself a small-towner, with 
this transcendent personality. In personally an- 
nouncing it, the author has been interested to find it 
met, on the part of small-town people, with a rising 
Ah! of illumination, and on the part of the incor- 
rigibly urban with an Oh! of half dismay, so true 


do all our concepts of Jesus run to our personal bias. 
vil 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE 





So, in the very act of putting forth the title, 4 
Small Town Man has become a symbol to the author, 
as is hoped it will be to the reader, of the one uni- 
versal strain of alikeness, differing only in expression, 
among all peoples, the alikeness of the mystical, 
inknowing faculty which reached its highest ex- 
pression in Jesus. It is also the happiest augury of 
a possibility of a finally unified human race, since, 
once a generally comprehensible vocabulary of terms 
is accepted, the mystics themselves are all agreed 
that this is the one field of human activity in which 
neither race, nor privilege, nor the quality of pre- 
ferred intellectuation, can affect the findings; the field 
of inknowing, spiritual perception. 

It was not with any expectation of writing a book 
that the seven years of scholarly research which lie 
behind A Small Town Man were begun. For the 
first four or five years the motivation was purely 
that of personal illumination. 

By the end of that time certain strongly marked 
outlines of the Life began to appear:—that Jesus 
was a small-town mystic, that he had a genius for 
mysticism; that his teaching, instead of being ex- 
tended over three years as is commonly supposed, 
was of little more than a year’s duration; and finally 
that the accounts of his post-crucifixion reappear- 
ances were, by every test of the folklorist, true, and 
not excessively legendized accounts of a man be- 


vill 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE 





lieved to have been legally executed, discovered to 
be alive, showing himself to a few intimates under 
conditions calculated to protect himself and them 
from further conflict with the authorities. Upon 
this outline, beginning with the nine credible 
sayings, bit by bit, by the same method in which 
authentic history is being recovered from our aborig- 
inal myths, the figure of Jesus as here presented, 
was built up. 

On the fifth day of January, 1915, I threw away 
my notes and began to write. About the middle of 
March immediately following, the manuscript of the 
first edition was ready for the publisher. 

If I recall these details now, having formerly 
omitted all reference to source and processes, it is 
not without intention. The same intention that led 
me, from the beginning, to decline all the patter of 
professional scholarship, all its working signs of ci- 
tation and attribution, the tithings of the mint and 
cumin of evidence. These things I have always 
recognized as the male ritual of truth-seeking, the 
castings away of the staff and the shoes of the sin- 
cere man on his way to the burning bush within 
which is God. It is only by these successive freeings 
of himself from prepossessions and prejudices that 
the intellectual man can approach truth with any 
approximation. For the average male soul exists 


at the focus, perhaps simultaneously at the foci, of 
1x 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE 


a vortex of the unorganized stuff of personality 
beside which the more compietely centralized soul of 
woman has always appeared a prolific source of 
mystification. Thus man moves outward toward 
the ordered conclusion, separating himself from 
what was originally other men’s, by identifying and 
shucking from his soul the serialization of himself 
which it is his natural life process to produce. Thus 
it has become the supreme courtesy of male scholar- 
ship to trail all the litter of the workshop after him 
in the shape of footnotes and cross references and 
appendices. But a woman is under no such obli- 
gation. There is no place in which she is as much at 
home as in the midst of the bush at whose burning 
she would not hesitate to boil the family kettle. The 
only obligation that she recognizes is that whatever 
is brought forth must, with whatever pains, be 
brought forth alive. If necessary she dies that this 
may be accomplished. And her natural method with 
whatever she produces is the method of gestation. 

The only sure way, then, of giving to the woman’s 
contribution its full evaluation, is for her to be faith- 
ful to her own pattern, of which vital organization 
rather than explication is the criterion. Otherwise, 
she produces little besides a lifeless imitation of the 
works of men. Believing this, I should hold myself 
faithless to my gift of courage, and to whatever grace 


I have, to present my work in any other fashion than 
x 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE 


woman fashion, even though I be proved in the end 
to have overlooked, or even faultily recalled, some 
of the minutize of scholarship. Liking, as little as 
anybody, to be found at fault, I take that risk; 
realizing that I am by no means past the mischance, 
from which I have suffered much, practically, in the 
past, of finding my work discredited or at least under- 
valued by the male mind. It is perhaps not realized 
even by men, who hold all the approaches of that 
perilous passage a book must run on its way to its 
public, to what extent a woman’s book is put to the 
man question. For there are men so sincerely of the 
opinion that a book which has not a certain foot fore- 
most, such a touching of the forelock of learning, 
such gestures, so distributed, two steps to the left 
and one to the right, is not really a book at all, that 
they have never asked themselves how that came 
to be the accepted notion of a book. But if I am not 
past the possibility of having my life of Jesus neg- 
lected because shorn of the male convention of 
scholarship, I was, even in 1915, past being daunted 
by it. 

The only other note I could add to this preface to 
the second and last edition would be my reason for 
writing at all about a two-thousand-year-old reve- 
lation. That is because it was only after having 
unwound my own life from the coil of a pattern laid 
upon it by the story of Jesus, exteriorized by the 


xi 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE 


succeeding generations of his followers, that I saw 
how bindingly that pattern has rested on our life, 
our art, upon the very prepossession in which the 
creative life is lived among us. This was not so 
clear in 1915 as it is to-day, now that the shape of 
that pattern is dissolving; so much clearer now that 
it is enough, perhaps, to say that that I have written 
this whole book for the sake of its last sentence. 


M. A. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 


Moses commanded us a law, even the inheritance of the 
congregation of J acob.— Deut. xxxiu, 4. 


[The above was taught to every Hebrew child by his father 
as soon as the child was old enough to speak. A little later 
he was taught the first part of the Shema, which follows. 
The whole Shema, including Deut. ix, 13-21, and Num. xv, 
37-41, was recited by every devout Hebrew morning and 
night.]} 


Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God 7s One Lord:— 

And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine 
heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might. And 
these words, which I command thee this day, shall be 
in thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently to 
thy children, and thou shalt talk of them when thou sittest 
in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and 
when thou hiest down and when thou risest uf. And 
thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and 
they shall be as a frontlet between thine eyes. And thou 
shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy 
gates.— Deut. vi, 4-9. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 


I 


HEN Tiberius,Ceesar had been some fifteen 

years upon the seat of Roman Empire there 
arose, in an inconsiderable quarter of his realm, a 
man of a destiny so tragic and a character so com- 
manding that a score of centuries have scarcely 
served to dim the appeal of his unique personality. 
He arose upon the Bridge of the World, shaken as it 
was with the passing of Roman power between 
Egypt and Asia, among the people whose voice 
among the nations was as the voice of one crying 
small wares in the midst of traffic. They were the 
Keepers of the Bridge. Their race had been born 
amid its ribs and buttresses; they had been swept 
from it by Egypt and Assyria, whence, after gen- 
erations of captivity, they had found their way 
back to it with the instinct of homing-pigeons. They 
sat upon the Bridge between the desert and the sea 


and trafficked with the nations going past; they 
8 


z A SMALL TOWN MAN 





trafficked even for the right to sit and traffic in their 
ancient seats. Sometimes they fought for it, but that 
was only when they were threatened in their sole 
other distinction. For they were not only a race of 
traffickers; they dreamed greatly. 

When the bazars were shut and the smoke of the 
evening sacrifice gone up, they forgathered upon the 
housetops with their feet tucked under them and 
dreamed a splendid and orderly heaven with Him of 
the Inefiable Name sitting in the midst of the vault, 
surrounded by rank on rank of Seraphim and 
Cherubim, angels and archangels, all singing and with 
flaming wings. They went further and dreamed a 
world of men in the same order and symmetry, a 
world dripping with milk and honey where there 
should be none hurt and none crying any more, and 
‘the lion and the lamb lying down together. It was 
perhaps a shopkeeper’s heaven, with everything 
ticketed and tucked away in it—think of a people 
undertaking to name the whole heavenly host !—but 
it surpassed in grandeur, in singleness of conception, 
the hybrid theogonies of the pagan world as much 
as the Greco-Roman Zeus-Pater, the Thunderer, 
was surpassed by their High and Holy One Who 
Inhabiteth Eternity. 

And for the right to worship this One-God in their 
own fashion and to keep undefiled His holy places the 
Jews would fight on occasion, but it was the only 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 5 


thing they would fight for. Their two great national 
achievements—the winning forth from Egypt and 
the return from captivity—they owed not to the 
sword, but to that quality which has made them 
before all others a business people. Once religious 
freedom was assured to them, they made what 
terms they could for a degree of political inde- 
pendence. 

These are two things to remember about the Jews 
in thinking of the man who arose among them: that 
their dreaming was all of God, and that when there 
was anything of great import to be done they thought 
of every other way to go about it rather than by 
fighting. It is well to keep these in mind because, 
however much a man of any race may seem to 
oppose the genius of the tribe that produced him, 
it is impossible that he should not take from them 
in some fashion the line of his direction. The 
third item in the resolution of the external forces 
that determined the mold of the man Jesus, was 
the fact that he was sprung from a mountain 
people. 

That was a country split into shoulders and 
summits, into narrow, knife-cut valleys and flowering 
oases between high, tumbled barrens. It followed 
that the inhabitants were divided into tribes and 
half tribes, and these into factions. It is always so 
in mountain countries where field is separated from 


6 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


field by waste, and village is buttressed against vil- 
lage. Carmel has its foot in the sea, Lebanon is cut 
off, Hermon the white-haired stands up over Naph- 
tali, Gilead and Ephraim are divided. The Samar- 
itans were despised by the Judeans, who found the 
Galileans crude; and the Galileans themselves 
doubted if any good thing could come out of Naza- 
reth. When they needed, therefore, a common bond 
they did not find it, as other tribes are prone to do, in 
political advantage or identity of material interests; 
they found it in the common dream, in the reality 
of a common spiritual experience. They fought for 
Jehovah and the holy places, even though they could 
not agree among themselves which places were the 
holiest. ‘That was how it happened that the people 
who never achieved anything like national integrity 
for themselves, except for the briefest periods, were 
the first to effect a movement toward the universal 
state. For when their great man came, he walked, 
though they failed for the time to appreciate it, 
in the deep-rutted track which Hebrew thought 
had made for him. 

The first that was heard of him was in connection 
with one of those singular characters which seem to 
have arisen from time to time among all ancient 
peoples, a true prophet by all the marks, of the 
stripe of Malachi and Habakkuk and Jeremiah. 

This John, called the Baptist, out of the hills of 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 7 


Judea, but citizen of that portion of the Bridge 
which reached from the roots of Lebanon past 
Naphtali, past Tabor and Hermon, past the plain 
of Esdraelon stretching to the narrow Phoenician 
coast, down the Rift of Jordan to the dead, desert sea. 
For this assumption we have the natural temper of 
his mind and the fact that he was amenable to the 
civil authority of Herod, Tetrarch of Galilee. He 
took a true prophet’s liberty with his sovereign 
by telling him exactly what he thought of him, and 
Herod, for his part, accorded John the customary 
recognition of kings to prophets by shutting him 
up in prison and finally making an end of him. But 
before that much had happened. 

About the time that the shadow of madness began 
to grow upon the mind of Tiberius Claudius Nero 
and the hateful race of informers fattened under the 
hand of Sejanus, when Herod Antipas was living 
openly with his brother’s wife, and Aretas, father of 
his legal consort, breathing war against him, this 
John began suddenly to preach the kingdom of 
heaven at hand. To the orthodox Jew the phrase, 
Kingdom of Heaven, meant the specific realization 
of the great national dream, an institution so Hebraic 
in its scope and limitation that it was doubtful if 
the world at large had any place in it beyond a 
vague consignment to an outer circle of darkness 
where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth. 


8 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





Therefore when John began to proclaim its imma- 
nence and declare it in that high impassioned style 
which is the hall-mark of prophetic inspiration, the 
little world of Jewry went out to hear him. 

In the first place, it might be true; and in the 
second, John was, on the whole, very good enter- 
tainment. He was an ascetic dressed in a garment 
of camel’s-hair girt about with skins, living off the 
land, on seeds of sparse-grown desert shrubs and 
honey from the hiving rocks along the bluffs of 
Jordan. Then there was this interesting new ritual 
of baptism—that was a poor Jew indeed, who 
couldn’t make room in his life for one more cere- 
monial—and he had a lively condemnation for such 
as are in authority, which is always pleasing to those 
not themselves among the authorities. Also there 
were devout souls who were in expectation, looking 
for the great day of Israel. Among them was the 
man from Nazareth. 

He must have come on foot from his home, a day’s 
journey, down the deepest rift in the world—it is 
not for mere poetizing that the river is called Jordan, 
the Down-comer—to the ford where Naaman washed, 
where the Ark of the Covenant passed over and 
the reeds are still shaken in the wind out of Haran. 
The soil hereabout is as red as a red heifer, streaked 
with marl. The river comes down between ribbons 
of deep poisonous green in a jungle of tamarisk and 

8 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 9 


oleander. Westward Judea lifts by terraces, dim 
under the heat haze, scarred by volcanic waste; 
east away lie the level tops of Gilead, out of which 
the prophet Elijah had so mysteriously burst upon 
the times of Ahab. Many thoughts of Israel past 
and future must have flocked with the crowds that 
went out to John’s preaching in the shut valley of 
the Jordan. Crowds there must have been far 
beyond what is indicated by the meager report, for 
the prophet succeeded not only in attracting the 
attention of the reigning house, but in staving off 
his end for a year or two by reason of his popularity. 
But for his survival in history and in the world 
beyond the Bridge he was debtor to the man from 
Nazareth. 

Of this man, up to the moment of his contact with 
John and the reorganization of his spiritual forces 
which took place immediately afterward, very little 
is known. His very name of Joshua has come down 
- to us only in the Greek form of Jesus. Beyond that 
we have the mere mention of his parents, Joseph 
and Mary, brothers James and Jude, Simon and 
Joses, and unnamed sisters. There is a tradition 
that he was born in Bethlehem while his mother 
was on a journey, all of which is set down with great 
circumstantiality by one Luke, a physician writing 
about the middle of the first century; but, if true, 
Jesus never referred to the place and never revisited 


10 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


it. He was brought up in the hill town of Nazareth 
to his father’s trade of carpenter. This much seems 
certain. For the rest we have a great body of 
legend such as collects readily about any man of 
singular gift or destiny. ‘These in their place should 
be examined; for the light they throw on the way 
in which, within a generation after his death, he 
came to be regarded, they have much to commend 
them. But of plain fact there is this precisely: a 
young Jew, something under thirty, of the better 
class of working-men, by name, Joshua Ben Joseph, 
receiving the rite of baptism from a wild anchorite 
on the mud-banks of a muddy river. 

There had been preaching first, perhaps a psalm- 
singing. It would have been in the nature of a 
pilgrimage, this exodus from Jerusalem; from Sa- 
maria, from the parts of Galilee and the east-lying 
Greco-Syrian Decapolis to hear the prophet. It was 
a time when men looked every way for salvation. 
John they heard with an instinctive attempt to 
connect him with their past, with those of his own 
trade prophecy. It was so they could best judge 
what his teaching might mean to the future of Israel. 
In their dreams the Jews looked for a Messiah, 
but in their hearts they expected Elijah, greatest 
of all True-Speaking. Among the faithful to this 
day is not the door left open on the Paschal evening 
for the return of the prophet? It was hereabout 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 11 


that he was last seen of men, parting the Jordan 
with his garment, passing over dry-shod before he 


was taken up. ... (Oh, the chariots of Israel and the 
horsemen thereof!’?) Memories like this prompted 
inquiry. 


“Who art thou, then?’ No doubt as they waited 
a supernatural thrill went over them. It was a 
time and a place when almost anything might hap- 
pen. But John had an answer for them. 

“The voice of one crying in the Wilderness. Pre- 
pare ye the way of the Lord!’ So now, they knew 
him. He was the forerunner. This also was ac- 
cording to scripture. But there was more of John’s 
message, and that astonishing. 

Of old time the prophets had preached to kings 
and high priests, to the nation in its entirety, re- 
buking tyrannies and putting down false gods, re- 
storing alike the altars and the ancient liberties. 
The new note that came in with John was the note 
of personal repentance, and not that only, but fruit 
meet for repentance brought forth on every bough, 
*“*For the axe is laid to the root of the trees: there- 
fore every tree which bringeth not forth fruit shall 
be hewn down and cast into the fire.’ Judge how 
this was received by the Hebrew who counted him- 
self safe in being of the stock of Abraham. ‘“‘And 
think not,” John warned them, “to say within 
yourselves, We have Abraham to our father, for 


12 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





I say unto you that God is able of these stones to 
raise up children unto Abraham.” 

This was the astonishment and the affront of 
John’s preaching. The Kingdom was at hand, and 
being a Jew wasn’t of itself sufficient to get you into 
it. It seems certain that many of his hearers, among 
them Herod, rejected such doctrine. But Herod 
John reproved openly for his adulteries, and to the 
Pharisees and Sadducees when he saw them come to 
his baptism he scoffed, “O ye generations of vipers, 
who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to 
come?” 

You perceive here the ancient prophetic touch 
both in the temper of his mind and the imagery. 
It would have been the end of the dry season, and 
all along the heights of Gilead quick fires ran in 
the stubble. In his mind’s eye John saw the tribes 
of formalists and hypocrites like swarms of vipers 
and scorpions scuttling for safety before the fires 
unquenchable. But for the common people who 
came asking sincerely what they should do, John 
had another answer, “‘He that hath two coats let 
him impart to him who hath none, and he that hath 
food let him do likewise.” To the publicans he 
advised, “‘Exact no more than that which is ap- 
pointed to you”’; and to the soldiers, ““Do violence 
to no man, neither exact anything wrongly, and be 
content with your wages.” 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 13 


An all too brief report, but explicit. In that last 
clause is swept away every possibility of supposing 
that John came to head a revolt against the power 
of Rome or to reconstruct the social order. This 
is important in connection with what happened 
afterward, for the teaching of the Baptist is the 
sole personal influence that can be traced in the 
work of the man from Nazareth. Words, phrases 
of the Forerunner, cropped up again in his ministry; 
its opening slogan was the same call to repentance. 
On the death of its founder the first definite move- 
ment of the Christian organization was in the di- 
rection of John’s program—they had all things in 
common; he that had two coats imparted to him 
that had none, and he that had food did likewise. 
Whether the disciples owed it most to Jesus or to 
John, it marks for the two men a common source of 
inspiration, a common expectation. 

The message of the Baptist was the thread by 
which Jesus felt his way to the heart of his own 
mission. The kingdom was at hand, it was to be 
prepared for, but the preparation had not all to 
do with God and man; it was bound up somehow 
with the relations between man and his neighbor. 
All this could hardly have come of one preaching. 
Years afterward Paul found Apollos, an Alexandrine 
convert, spreading the baptism of John as far afield 
as Ephesus. All of which goes to show the perti- 


14 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


nence of his doctrine and the man’s grip on his au- 
dience. 

Of this there were both numbers and variety. 
The river here meets the highways; legionaries 
went by between Petra and Damascus, caravans 
from Egypt to the parts of Arabia. At the ford the 
thick ribbon of tamarisk and oleander called the 
Pride of Jordan is set back by the canebrake. 
Old herons go a-fishing there; the hot air of the Rift 
is filled with the pestiferous hum of flies. By day 
there would be the noise of the caravans and the 
purr of the sleek water; by night the friendly pil- 
grim camps, the brush fires of the wood-cutters; 
at times the roar of a lion in the jungle, and the 
snorting of the tethered asses. Over all the voice 
of the prophet prevailing. 

**Repent ye, repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven 
is at hand... but one mightier than I cometh, the 
latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose, 
whose fan is in his hand, and he will thoroughly 
purge his floor and will gather the wheat unto his 
garner, but the chaff he will burn with a fire un- 
quenchable. 

“TT have baptized you with water, but he shall 
baptize you with fire and the holy spirit.” 

Among those who, hearing, went down to receive 
the rite of cleansing was the young man from 
Nazareth; as he went he felt the heavens opened 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 15 


and the Spirit of God descend upon him; and as it 
were a voice saying, “This is my beloved son in 
whom I am well pleased.”’ 

§ 

All the God-tales come straight out of the heart 
of man; all the devil-tales also. 

There is a part of us which lies remote from the 
region of material sense, open to all manner of 
undetermined influences. We are torn by these 
things, exalted, cast down, informed, and illumined 
to a degree surpassing what comes to us through the 
conscious intelligence. But when we speak of them 
it can only be in terms shaped for us by the latest 
guess at the nature of the disturbance, God, demon, 
or the spirits of ancestors. The young man from 
Nazareth, as he passed under the Baptist’s hand 
through the water of baptism, knew what sounded 
in his soul for the voice of God the Father. He was 
led by it up out of the Rift of Jordan into the Wilder- 
ness. But of all that happened to him there we 
know no more than can be conveyed in a tale he 
made of it, a kind of allegory of the soul’s immaterial 
conflict in terms of devil and angels. 

It was so in those days men spoke to one another 
of experiences that passed below the threshold of 
exterior sense. Doubtless when he told it, it was 
so understood, as a thing experienced rather than 
seen. Not for hundreds of years did the story of 


16 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





the temptation put on the gross materiality under 
which the Middle Ages knew it. 

That it was his most significant experience we 
gather from the fact that it was the only thing that 
ever happened to Jesus which he thought worth 
speaking about. That he spoke of this with such 
particularity as to impress it on all his disciples is 
our warrant for believing that nothing else out of 
the ordinary ever had happened to him. What he 
saw, what he lived through, what he heard talked 
about as a carpenter at Nazareth was so undistin- 
guished a part of the community experience that 
we are free to restore it from the copious researches 
of scholarship. Behind this thin veil of parable 
we have his own account of the essential elements 
of his genius. 

Here then is the story of the carpenter in the 
Wilderness as he told it. After he had heard sound- 
ing through all his soul the acknowledgment of his 
sonship, himself part and parcel of the divine being, 
he went up and out of the Ghor into the Wilderness 
of Judea between the brook Cherith and the vine- 
yards of Engedi, a terrible blank land, treeless, 
spined with low shrubs from under which the adder 
starts. He was around and about in it forty days 
fasting. He saw vultures sailing and the blue wall 
of Moab through the mist of evaporation from the 
great salt sea—‘smoke going up for ever”—all 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 17 


opalescent in the unclouded light, but saw no man. 
He laid himself open to the sense the desert gives 
of being possessed, of begin. held and occupied by 
personality and power. Forty days and nights the 
spirit led and eluded him, and at last he grappled 
with it. Then said the tempter, Jesus being faint 
with hunger, “If thou be the son of God command 
that these stones be made bread.” And again, 
seeing he got nothing by that method, the devil 
set him on a high place, as it were the pinnacle of 
the temple, and bade him cast himself down, since 
if he were the true son of God the angels should 
have charge over him, lest he so much as dash his 
foot against a stone. Finally from a high moun- 
tain the devil showed him the kingdoms of this world 
and the glory of them, saying, “All these things will 
I give if thou wilt fall down and worship me.” 

Answering out of the deep wells of scripture, the 
man from Nazareth answered his own soul. 

He had gone into the desert a carpenter with the 
word of John in his ears and the call of God in his 
consciousness; he came out of it prophet and teacher. 
To know the full force in his life of the answer he 
found to the questing Spirit, we must know what 
went in with him other than John’s doctrine. I do 
not mean what schooling, what human experiences, 
what things observed and noted among men, for of 
these he had no more than was common to scores 


18 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


of other young men who went down to John’s 
baptism. It was none of these things which en- 
abled him to clear himself at the stroke of revela- 
tion from the old Hebrew notion of man apart from 
God as the sheep are apart from the shepherd, of 
another nature and kind from him. For Israel 
thought of God as a sheep thinks of a shepherd. 
One who led by green pastures, fed, fended, or de- 
stroyed as He thought good for them. But Jesus, 
from the first we hear of him, comes filled with the 
sense of divine kinship, possessed of it as a son is 
possessed of the attributes of a father—an idea so 
germane to us now that we can scarcely realize with 
what effect of the heavens being opened it burst 
upon him. 

It was not, then, any question of the relationship 
between himself and God that drove him to the 
Wilderness. There is something still to seek for 
the clear understanding of the parable of the Temp- 
tations;—Something there was between Jesus and 
John, something between Jesus and his disciples, 
which was either so well understood as to require 
no explanation or so profoundly felt that it lay be- 
yond the reach of expression. I find it in the one 
feature of the Hebrew religion which distinguishes 
it from all its contemporaries;—in the conviction 
of the reality of righteousness. 

The cult of Jehovah had outlived on its own 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 19 


ground the gods of Ninevah and Tyre, of Egypt and 
Babylon; it maintained itself in the face of dying 
Greeco-Romanism by that one article of its faith 
which was never lost sight of even in its worst 
apostasy—namely, that ethical rightness is no 
mere matter of opinion, but a living principle. The 
pagan had no use whatever of his gods except in 
what they could do for him; he never, so to speak, 
knew exactly where to have them. In some 
fashion he recognized an essential element in 
Things, dung-heaps, orchards, fevers—which, if he 
could but put himself in harmony with it, could 
_be “worked.” 

When it could no longer be worked in his favor 
he got him a new god amenable to another sort of 
persuasion. But Jehovah was the god of Israel 
conquering or Israel conquered. This point toward 
which we struggle so slowly with all our science, 
our knowledge of heredity, and the constitution of 
human society, was the common possession of 
Jesus and his people; the revelation of righteousness 
as a thing to be eternally sought after, whether one 
lost or won by it. 

This, then, was what lies behind and renders in- 
telligible the fragments of scripture with which 
Jesus met the importunities of his personal life, 
coming to him in the form of the arch-tempter on 
the mount of the Wilderness. 


20 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


In the first and second of these we have a direct 
answer to two of the most vexed and mistaken 
problems of his name people. To the suggestion 
that he should appease the desires of his man-nature 
by causing stones to be made bread, Jesus had an- 
swered that man does not live by bread alone, but 
by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth 
of God. It is impossible to think of this as present- 
ing itself to the man from Nazareth as a personal 
problem only—the problem of youth with its hun- 
gry desires for food, a mate, houses, trappings. 
But whether settled for himself or humanity, the 
question was never reopened. ‘This is no story of 
a plain man finding himself, but of a soul unselfed 
from the beginning, apprised: of his power, sure of 
his high calling, seeking behind all material lack, 
the essential disharmony which his message was to 
heal. Socially minded as he showed himself to be, 
he must have faced here and struck out of his own 
course the futility of attempting to achieve the 
kingdom by the relief of immediate social discom- 
fort. Hungry as his time was, sore with poverty 
and injustice and oppression, when he went back to 
it, it was not with any palliative, but with the keen 
sword of the spirit. The misery of his world rose 
up against him, assailed him through his great gift 
of compassion, threatened to engulf him; but al- 
ways we see him striking clear of it, committing 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 21 


himself to the Word with such confidence as a bird 
commits itself to the air or a great fish to the 
deep. 

But if Jesus rejected the principle of direct relief 
as a means of bringing the kingdom to pass, he was 
even more explicit in his condemnation of direct 
political action as establishing it. For the devil in 
Jesus’ time was no mere hoof-and-tail bogy, but that 
Lucifer whose seat was once in heaven. And what 
else can the worship of him mean in connection with 
the kingdoms of this world and the power and glory 
of them, than the use of satanic means, political in- 
trigue, jealousy, faction, conspiracy, by means of 
which the rebellious angels fell? We shall come 
closer than this to the mind of Jesus touching the 
social organization, but we shall get nothing more 
decisive than his, “Get thee behind me!”’ 

For the second item of the adventure of a soul 
in the Wilderness there can be no interpretation 
possible except we begin with what sooner or later 
must be allowed to Jesus, that he was a mystic. In 
saying this no more is implied than is true in some 
degree of every one of us. It is to say that the larger 
half of him lay consciously in the region of which 
we have already had occasion to speak, the un- 
mapped region of the subconsciousness. Your true 
mystic is one who lives at home in that country to 
which most of us repair infrequently on a visit, or 


2Q A SMALL TOWN MAN 


are snatched by compelling incidents of passion or 
suffering. The notion that mysticism savors some- 
how of impracticality leads us to deny its existence 
in ourselves, which amounts to a denial that there 
is anything in us which is immaterial or uncompre- 
hended. To such as these it is a surprise to know 
that the states of mysticism preserve an orderly 
sequence and are accompanied by definite gains and 
powers. Such powers the man from Nazareth at- 
tained. To have endured this particular tempta- 
tion he must already have been aware of them when 
he went up out of Jordan. 

Almost the first we hear of Jesus on his return te 
Galilee, was as a healer of men’s bodies and a reader 
of their minds. Such powers cannot be thought of 
as coming leaping to the demand; they are acquired 
by pains and labor. If, then, we concede that 
when Jesus went into the Wilderness he knew 
himself possessed of such capabilities, we have in 
the incident of the pinnacle from which he was to 
cast himself down, a symbol of the peculiar tempta- 
tion of the gifted. To make himself safe, to make 
himself wondered at, set apart, this is the devil’s 
bait for the saint and the adept. Whether or not 
this was what Jesus implied in his personal narra- 
tive, it is borne out by his whole attitude toward his 
special capacities. All through his career he dis- 
played, in the use of his extraordinary gifts, a reti- 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 23 


cence and sense of proportion unequaled among 
men of genius. 

This was the fruit of the Wilderness, the subordi- 
nation of bodily and material needs to the spiritual, 
based on the perception of the spiritual as the only 
reality; the consecration of gifts to service rather 
than to personal aggrandizement; the rejection of 
political action as a means of attaining the desired 
social equilibrium. If this were not the implicit 
meaning of the parable it was at least a thing achieved 
within the scope of his personality. Throughout 
the remainder of his life he is plainly seen so to di- 
rect his own operations. For in this he excelled 
all the saints, in his spiritual efficiency. What he 
had determined on the mountain he went forth to 
preach in Galilee. 


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Writh great love hast thou loved us, 
O Lord our God. 
And with much overflowing pity hast thou pitied 
us, 
Our father and our king. 
For the sake of our fathers who trusted in thee, 
and thou taughtest them the statutes of life, 
Have mercy upon us! 
Enlighten our eyes in the Jaw; 
cause our hearts to cleave to thy commandments; 
unite our hearts to Jove and fear thy name; 
and we shall not be fut to shame. 
World without end. 
For thou art a God who preparest salvation; 
and thou hast chosen us from among all nations 
and tongues; 
and hast in truth brought us nearer to thy great 
name. 
Selah! 
That we may lovingly praise thee and thy unity. 
Blessed be the Lord who in love chose his people 
Israel! 


[A prayer which was part of the synagogue service during 
the time of Jesus.]} 










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i 


F this Herod against whom John inveighed we 

shall see enough to warrant some description. 
A Jew by religion, Greek in culture, though with a 
touch of Semitic magnificence, Roman by affiliation; 
handsome, undisciplined, perfumed, wily, he no 
doubt deserved the epithet of Fox, which the man 
of Nazareth afterward applied to him. Fearing 
Rome a little and his constituents as much as rulers 
of the Jews have always feared them, he neverthe- 
less claims a greater share of our attention than 
either of the other sons of Herod the Great, among 
whom his kingdom was divided. 

Archelaus, Ethnarch of Idumea, Judea and Sa- 
maria, came into direct conflict with the Sanhedrin 
at Jerusalem, was worsted by them, deposed and 
superseded by a procurator under the hand of the 
Emperor. Philip on the north, touching the bor- 
ders of Galilee, loved peace and got it, and got 
nothing else; but if Herod, called Antipas, Tetrarch 
of Galilee, were judged less objectionable than his 
father, it was because his restricted field gave him 


fewer opportunities for getting himself disliked. 
27 


28 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


Of those that he had it cannot be said that he neglect- 
ed any of them. 

On the present occasion he was discovering him- 
self in the irritating: position of a man who has 
flouted society and the gods on the grounds of a 
justifying passion, and finds that neither the gods 
nor society has accepted his justification. During 
a recent visit to Rome he had become enamoured of 
his brother’s wife, whom he had brought away with 
him; whereupon Aretas, King of Arabia, father of 
his legal consort, assaulted his southern border. It 
was while his affairs were at this pass that John 
arose, shaking out the banner of prophetic denun- 
clation. 

Evidently those who accepted his moral conclu- 
sions judged John competent to deal with the situa- 
tion. The man from Nazareth, though made one 
of John’s adherents by the rite of baptism, passed to 
his own country without any attempt to support the 
Baptist’s attack upon existing conditions. If from 
the mount of temptation he had seen the thin line 
of the legionaries fumbling the dry passes of the 
Arabian border, or at the ford of Jordan detach- 
ments going down from the garrison at Capernaum 
to eke out the Tetrarch’s slender resources, it waked 
in him no impulse of resistance to the established 
order. Wrapt still in his personal revelation, he 
came up out of the Rift into Galilee. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 29 


From the hills of Nazareth one sees the ships of 
the Empire low like a flock of gulls on the rim of 
the Mediterranean; below him the oleanders are 
pink against the whitewashed walls, and blunt, 
dark oaks overhang the strips of tillage. A Iit- 
tle town, a butt, a Jack Dullard of a town among 
the smart new cities of Tiberias and Capernaum 
with their Greek theaters and Roman garrisons; 
a little, old, shave-head, bewigged Hebrew house- 
wife of a town, to judge by the proverb, which 
suckled a prophet and did not know him. But 
at Capernaum converged all the roads that went 
over the Bridge: new Roman roads, Phcenician 
coast roads, the oldest roads in the world between 
Egypt and Asia; and the traffic of the world went 
by on them. Herod rebuilt Tiberias and had a 
palace there; he fortified Sepphoris; village touched 
village. Here, as to a theater more befitting his 
mission than hill-bent Nazareth, Jesus moved, 
new-born from the Wilderness. It is believed he 
had a house there, but of a shop and the appurte- 
nances of his trade there is no mention. 

On omissions slight as this, a world sick with the 
sloth of the Middle Ages made of. him a kind of 
respectable mendicant. One finds him, however, 
going about with other householders, decent folk 
owning their own business, employing hired servants, 
paying their own scores, and obliged to ask no man’s 


30 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


leave if they chose to lay aside their work for a 
season to go a-proselyting. It is of record that the 
Emperor Domitian, having accepted the Davidic 
descent for the family of Nazareth, sent for what 
remained of them, fearful lest they set up a belated 
claim of royalty. There were brought to him two 
grandsons of Jude, the brother of Jesus, who showed 
him the callouses of their hands and confessed to 
owning about forty acres of land, from which they 
made their living and the taxes. Does the pos- 
session of that forty acres in any way account for 
the freedom with which the brother of Jude drew 
upon the sowing and the reaping, the wine-press 
and the orchard, for the figure of the Kingdom? He 
drew, in fact, far less on his own trade and his 
father’s. ‘Too much has been made of his being a 
carpenter—every good Jew taught his son a trade; 
Paul was a tent-maker, and he stood before kings 
and was versed in pagan philosophies. 

Nor was there anything in the conditions in Galilee 
at the time from which to draw the pathetic figure 
of poverty. Galilee of the Gentiles was a great 
hostelry; trade flourished, olive-orchards thronged 
the slopes, vines crowded in the valleys. Here the 
Semitic strain had received a free admixture of Greek 
and Phoenician; the speech of its people was fluent, 
idiomatic. Moreover, it was a time of great leisure, 
every seventh day was an idle day, every seventh 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 31 


year a Sabbath. The people read much in the only 
books they had, the Law and the Prophets, and 
speculated freely. Like all thinking people, they 
were turbulent. Recently Judas the Gaulonite headed 
an attempt, of amazing courage but little descretion, 
to break the Roman power, holding the payment 
of tribute little less than slavery. Two thousand 
of Herod’s soldiers revolted. It was a time not 
so much of lack as of enormous social and economic 
disequilibrium. In short, a time very much like our 
own. Across the active material life of its three 
million population the beauty of the land struck 
like an inspiration. Hot harvesters lifted their fore- 
heads to the wind that poured down from Hermon; 
on the lake sails glittered. 

It was a fat land, but rebellious, humming with 
Zelots, Baptists, Essenes—a people jeoparding their 
life unto death. All in all an excellent field for hope 
to flourish in, such a hope as the man from Nazareth 
carried back from the Rift of Jordan, of a reconstruct- 
ed social order in which imposition should wither 
and servitude be replaced by service. A fat land 
and well watered—but the taxes, the taxes! It is 
not prolonged underfeeding that makes revolution- 
ists, but enforced compliance in the overfeeding of 
others. And here now was this new war of Herod’s 
with its levies and impositions! 

In the midst of all this Jesus went about quietly 


32 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


fishing for men. He found Peter, and Andrew, his 
brother, and the sons of Zebedee, owners of fishing- 
smacks on Gennesaret. One thinks of him going 
about, tall and personable—a figure, at least, of 
which none ever complained of any lack—free strid- 
ing; and a Jew, mind you, a high-nosed Jew with eyes 
at once veiled and piercing, long-haired and bearded. 
The hair and the beard have become so fixed in tra- 
dition that, whether or no, we must accept them. 
No doubt it was one of the first pieces of personal 
information that began to be circulated about him; 
and they go with the temperament. One could have 
found him oftenest about the water-front when the 
fishing-fleet came in, clad in a long undergarment 
of linen and over it a woolen mantle, brown and 
white or blue, girded with leather, and always with 
the turban. When he stood up in the synagogue 
of a Sabbath to expound the scriptures, the linen 
garment girded about the breast, the mantle would 
be all white with a fringe upon it, and the long ends 
of the turban floating over the hair and the mantle. 
In some such guise he went about Capernaum, 
sowing the Word and waiting. And at last the 
thing for which he waited happened. 

Herod, vexed at his failure to scatter the armies 
of Aretas, and no doubt egged on by Herodias, who 
must have been in a fury to have her name bruited 
about at the crossroads as an adulteress, had taken 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 33 





John and shut him up in prison. He shut him up 
in that stark fortress which has the Dead Sea on 
the west and the dead sand and black rock of 
Macherus on all other sides of it; but in the face of 
John’s popularity, lacked hardihood to make any 
other end of the matter. 

There had been doubts and disaffections in Herod 
the Great’s time, because of his being no true He- 
brew, but an Idumean. Herod characteristically 
has been reported as burning up the books of geneal- 
ogy in the temple, proving himself a Jew by putting 
it beyond the possibility of anybody’s disproving 
it. But this double fear and vexation of Herod 
Antipas is the true mark of Israel. John as a stirrer- 
up of the people must be treated as a nuisance; as 
a prophet he was to be venerated. Herod accom- 
plished both by putting him in jail and afterward 
giving his disciples access to him. So for a time the 
voice of the Wilderness was stilled, but no sooner 
had the news of John’s imprisonment penetrated to 
the rich lake region of lower Galilee than it rose 
again in new accents. It was the voice of Jesus 
beginning to preach openly and say, “‘Repent; 
repent; for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” 

§ 

The rise of any great man in a community is 
always an astonishment. His essential processes 
are secret or obscured by ebullitions which present 


34 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





themselves as offenses in the general eye. And the 
general eye and ear are so completely filled with 
their own affairs; that which finally disconcerts 
them and claims anew their attention is the least 
essential part of the message which the great have 
to deliver. The interest of the crowd, like the snake, 
darts at the thing moving. 

About the end of the latter rains, when it seemed 
certain that the Baptist was not to be let preach 
again, the young carpenter, who had recently come 
from Nazareth, stood up in the synagogue at Caper- 
naum and began to expound the scriptures. There 
had been the customary singing of psalms, the prayer 
beginning, “With great love hast Thou loved us...” 
and so down to “Blessed be the Lord Who in love 
chose His people Israel.” After that the methurge- 
man read from the Law, reading in Hebrew, in which 
language alone the scriptures were permitted to be 
written, and translating into the vernacular. ‘There 
was a little light burning always in the synagogue 
since the captivity of Babylon, a tiny oil-fed flicker 
before the place where the Law was kept. It wasa 
symbol, that little flame, of the little light that was 
still in Israel, feebly burning in the midst of a de- 
cadent formalism. 

The light burned, the reader closed the roll of 
the Law, the leaders of the synagogues in the 
chief seats, facing the congregation, looked down 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 35 





their beards at their hands folded upon their knees; 
the women stirred faintly in the jalousied gal- 
leries; and the carpenter rose and sat in the seat 
of the reader. There was nothing out of the ordi- 
nary in this. Whosoever felt the Spirit of the Lord 
upon him was privileged to speak in the synagogue, 
but it was a privilege taken seriously. Perhaps noth- 
ing would have come of this particular preaching 
had there not been a man present afflicted with one 
of those forms of mental disorder which were ranked 
as possession by an unclean spirit. Roused by the 
unfamiliar figure, by something impressive and 
pertinent in the preacher’s manner, the spirit cried 
out at him. Did it really cry: “I know thee who 
thou art, Thou Holy One of Israel!’ guessing in 
some dim way, as the afflicted do, the man’s power 
and destiny, or was it merely a disordered outbreak 
recognizing the speaker as one seen too often with 
Zelots and Baptists, fomenters of social discontent? 
“I know you, Jesus of Nazareth. Let us alone!” 
The old cry of the social unawakened. “What have 
we to do with thee? Thou art come to upset con- 
ditions and invite Rome to destroy us.” Certainly 
the words would bear that interpretation. So they 
sounded yesterday around a soap-box on the street 
corner. And there were men in that congregation 
who could remember in the outbreak of Judas the 
Gaulonite the punishment Rome meted to revolu- 


36 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


tionists. What fixed their attention on this occasion 
was that Jesus rebuked the interruption as the cry 
of uncleanness and commanded the evil spirit out 
of the afflicted. They began to wonder what doc- 
trine this could be, and to observe among them- 
selves that he taught not as the scribes, but as one 
having authority. 

It appears that immediately following the syna- 
gogue service Jesus went home with Simon Peter 
to dinner, and found Peter’s wife’s mother sick of a 
fever. Possibly she had had a draught from a practis- 
ing physician, compounded of three black spiders 
collected from a tomb, and an Egyptian herb or 
two, but it is much more likely that some neigh- 
bor had practised for her the Talmudic remedy of 
an iron knife tied by a braid of the sufferer’s hair to 
a thorn-bush while reciting the first five verses of 
the third chapter of Exodus. Now comes the car- 
penter, taking her by hand, lifting her up, and im- 
mediately the fever left her. 

In order to understand how the news of such heal- 
ing would spread with almost frenzied hope to the 
afflicted, one must pause a moment over the pitiful 
inefficiency of the healing art of that period. For in 
that day the practice of medicine had been corrupted 
from the primitive knowledge of cleanliness and 
simples to a mass of superstition. The cause of 
all sickness was a mystery, and it was believable 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 37 


that cures could be equally mysterious. The poor 
were particularly in evil case; for failing eyes there 
was no relief, for deformities no appliances, for an- 
guish no twilight sleep of anesthetics, only neglect 
and avoidance and the unendurable pest of flies. 
Associated, as it had always been, with all manner 
of hocus-pocus, mental healing was still more reliable 
than the pharmacopceia of the time. Between touch- 
ing the robe of a prophet and a dose of mummy 
powder as a specific of internal disorders, the chances 
of recovery were immeasurably in favor of the 
prophet. 

As this is the first record of healing, it is prob- 
able that the exercise of it had come upon Jesus as 
a mere incident in the rush of spiritual certainty 
which had launched him upon his ministry. Filled 
with the power of his revelation, he had overflowed 
with it in the direction of the immediate human im- 
pulse and was as little prepared as any one for what 
followed. That evening, as soon as the sun was set 
and the Sabbath inhibition taken away, from every 
house in the neighborhood sick were brought forth 
and laid in the narrow street about Simon Peter’s 
door. Here, as afterward, the man from Nazareth 
yielded to the appeal of human misery, but he was 
more than troubled by it. 

No doubt he saw himself, as from this time we 
must think of him, as having raised the cry of uni- 


38 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





versal deliverance, and hearing it drowned in the 
wails of immediate material anguish. As soon as 
it was light, without disturbing the household, he 
slipped away out of town; he traversed the crescent 
plain of Gennesaret between the stone walls and the 
hedges of prickly shrub, and sought the treeless foot- 
hill ridges. It was spring of the year, and thick 
dew, called the blessing of Hermon, lay on every- 
thing. Palms at Tiberias showed darkly against the 
polished lake, the olive-orchards turned the silvered 
under side of leaves. White fire broke out along the 
orchard row, anemones scarlet in the crevices, lark- 
spurs, blue-eyed veronica, and the hillside grass all 
swimming with the silken sails of poppies. Binding 
all the fields together ran the wild mustard, and the 
birds of the air lodged in its branches. 

Past it all he went to the windy ridges from 
which one had the sea and the white slope of Her- 
mon, with the Jordan roaring to the deepest rift in 
the world far below him. Here he prayed, and here, 
when the day was somewhat advanced, Peter found 
him with the word that all men sought him. But 
when all was said Jesus would not go back into 
Capernaum. 

“Let us go into the next town that I may preach 
there,” he insisted; “for this purpose came I forth.” 
Perhaps he still hoped to avoid the swift congre- 
gation of the miserable which clogged about his 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 39 





knees thenceforth wherever he moved; he was all 
bent upon his message. It was in this fashion, ac- 
companied by Peter and those that were with him, 
he began to go about through the cities of Galilee, 
teaching in the synagogues, John being in prison, 
Herod in jeopardy with Aretas, Tiberius on the seat 
of Rome, and the destruction of Jerusalem some 
forty years distant. 









ns Nye atin i a ‘ OS hei ae 
« re ’ 4 5 OS. 


oe ; RG ie Hs ies 









i yh 
iv re 
vp. re ty a 


He shal] thrust out sinners from the inheritance; 
he shall utterly destroy the proud sfirit of the 
sinners, 
as a potter’s vessel with a rod of tron shall he 
break in pieces all their substance. 


And he shall gather together a holy peofle whom 
he shal] lead in righteousness: 

And he shal] judge the tribe of the people that hath 
been sanctified by the Lord his God. 


For he shal] not fut his trust in the horse and 
rider and bow; 
nor shall he multiply unto himself gold and 
silver for war; 
nor by shifs shall he gather confidence in the 
day of battle. 


Tending the flock of the Lord with faith and 


righteousness ; 
and he shall suffer none among them to faint in 
their pasture. 
In holiness shal] he lead them all, and there shall 
be no pride among them that any should 


be oppressed. 


[Verses from a hymn of the Pharisees, sung during the 
time of Jesus and influencing the Messianic ideal. From the 
translation of Ryce and James.]| 










ant a fe ae ee TaN AY NANG yet NA, ey, 
f “A 4 eit ‘ 4 v 





Wa Maa Ae 








f : ‘i Ay 
: ‘ iy 
, 
: eh ut é 
») ‘4 4 7) te WN ot a 
ATS of phd ee yi ep 


Tit 


O people can hear absolutely a new thing. 

The message that is delivered to them is one 
thing; the message heard is already half in the 
hearts of the hearers. 

Jesus did not invent the phrase Kingdom of 
Heaven; what he did contrive in the course of twelve 
or fourteen months’ teaching was to give to it en- 
tirely new meanings. As it stood in the heart of 
Israel it was a vision of a social order in which 
governorship should be of God and all temporal 
authority superseded by the Word. Working on 
this, the imagination of the time produced prodigies. 
More and more as the Gentile world pressed upon 
Jewry, it had to be accounted for; how could the 
Kingdom come to a people knowing not Jehovah? 
Opinions differed as to whether Rome should be cast 
into outer darkness or be permitted to feel upon her 
neck the heel of Jewish autonomy. It might be 
that the Davidic line should be restored as a mere 
symbol of governance, or there would be twelve 
thrones of the twelve princes of the House of Israel. 


Differences of this kind were not doctrinal; they af- 
43 


44 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


forded a pleasant variation to speculation. As the 
tension of social and political unrest which ended 
in the revolt and fall of Jerusalem increased, they 
took on a prophet cast. It was expected that 
swords should fall from heaven and come flaming in 
the midst of men, the earth should yawn and all 
the widening rifts be filled with dead. The apoca- 
lypse, the vision of Judgment, was a favorite form 
of literature of the period. 

There is a general impression that prophetic writ- 
ing had ceased in Israel from the time of the old 
testament to the gospels; but in fact there was a 
continuous but diminishing flow of it. The Jews 
had no profane history. All their writings were ac- 
counts of God in His dealings with them, either as 
individuals or as a nation. Books of this kind, 
bringing the story of Israel down to his own time, 
were in circulation, and had been read by Jesus; 
he quoted from them; from the book of Enoch he 
took the title which he very early began to apply 
to himself, The Son of Man. 

But if no importance was attached to individual 
conceptions of the Kingdom and the manner of its 
inauguration, all Jewry was divided even to the 
sword and the spirit about the proper preparation 
for it. Theoretically Israel was a people united in 
the law, one in worship; actually it was split into 
sects and factions over minutie of fulfilment. There 


A SMALL TOWN MAN AS 


was that old quarrel between the Samaritans and 
the Judeans concerning the mount upon which God 
should be worshiped, which had resulted, in the 
time of Cyrenius, in the Samaritans being disbarred 
from the temple. There were at least two ascetic 
orders, the Nazarites and Essenes—of whom the 
first were as old as the time of the prophets—men 
dedicate to God from birth and sometimes before 
it, drinking no wine, celibate, cutting neither the 
hair nor the beard. They walked apart and sought 
out God in their own hearts. 

The Essenes lived in communities, repudiated 
marriage for themselves, but adopted children, 
prayed before and after meals, wore white, and had 
a sense of caste which made the touch of lower 
orders a defilement. They made no sacrifice except 
of their desires, devoted themselves to good works 
and practised healing. They had community houses 
in all the large cities. It is not unlikely that as a 
lad the carpenter’s son had gone to school to 
them, a kind of friar’s school where one learned 
to read the scriptures and be truthful, chaste, and 
obedient. 

Though they served to color the religious thought 
of the time, in numbers both Nazarites and Essenes 
were inconsiderable. The great body of the Jews 
were either Pharisees or Sadducees. These last 
were mainly of aristocratic and priestly families. 


46 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


They held a practical monopoly of the Sanhedrin 
and the priestly offices, repudiating life after death, 
disbelieving God as far as anybody of that time 
dared disbelieve Him. Opportunists, bent upon 
maintaining their own rights and privileges, they 
were sensitive to popular disorder lest it give the 
Romans an excuse for removing them. 

Against these were the Pharisees, the aristocracy 
of moral assumption. So successful had they been 
in putting over on the masses the conviction of 
their superior virtue that as patterns they had 
largely superseded the priesthood; in company with 
the Scribes, those scholarly and pedantic searchers 
of the scriptures, they set, as it were, the fashions 
in moral behavior. Their fields of action were chief- 
ly the Rabbinical schools, where they taught that 
there is an immortal vigor in man which can be 
nourished to rewards or punishments in the life be- 
yond this. Over-nice in their liturgical observances, 
they were nevertheless the conservers of what was 
left of the ancient Jewish integrity. 

In addition to these, in Galilee there were two fire- 
new vessels of social discontent: the following of the 
Baptist, among whom we reckon the man from Naz- 
areth, and the adherents of Judas, called the Zelot, 
a considerable band who went mad with the abuse 
of authority under Gessius Florius, the procurator, 
who were reported not to value death nor any kind 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 47 





of dying so long as they might call no man lord. 
They “had an inviolable attachment to liberty,” 
and for the rest they agreed with the moral teach- 
ings of the Pharisees. 

Over all was the hand of Rome, penetrating even 
into the dreams of men, so that they could not so 
much as imagine Heaven except in the terms of 
kingdoms and authority. 

Into all this welter of formalism and self-seeking, 
formalism and piety, into attempted Hellenic culture 
and hole-in-the-corner asceticism the man from Naza- 
reth poured out his message, to meet and contend with 
it, and be set back in its course like a stream pouring 
into the sea, finally to mix with it so that never any 
more could its meaning be traced clear until men 
should cease seeking at the meeting of the waters 
in the muddled Word, but turn back to the immortal 
source of the Spirit. 

It is a mistake, however, to think of Jesus at the 
outset of his career as opposed to all this; he was an 
inextricable part of it. Himself an avowed Baptist, 
there is some reason to believe that he held himself 
Nazar, vowed, set apart for God; he borrowed freely 
from the practices of the Essenes. It is probable 
that the family at Nazareth was pharisaical in the 
best sense, leaning a little to the too scrupulous ful- 
filment of the law rather than to a neglect of it. His 
brother James, at least, turned out a great pietist, 


48 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


and, though he suffered a martyr’s death, is described 
as wearing callouses on his knees praying in the 
temple for the spread of Christianity. 

At least one of the disciples was a Zelot, and prob- 
ably all of them Baptists. One guesses that a cer- 
tain aloofness discernible in the beginning of his 
ministry was actuated by the desire of Jesus to free 
himself from all these tangled and entangling lines 
of influence. 

None of these, however, gave him so personal a 
difficulty as the effort to prevent his teaching from 
being swamped in the immediate human demand 
for material relief. After the opening of his ministry 
in Capernaum he made a tour of the neighboring 
cities, preaching in the synagogues and suffering 
similar interruptions. 

A ‘leper, to whom knowledge of the new prophet’s 
healing power had come, followed him across the 
fields, protesting, “If thou wilt thou canst make me 
clean.” It was not an extravagant confidence. 
The liturgical detail to be observed by a leper who 
has been cleansed is too complete not to warrant 
the conclusion that mental healing of leprosy was 
possible, even frequent, in Palestine. Although 
Jesus avoided healing, it is not of record that, once 
the afflicted succeeded in gaining his attention, he 
ever refused relief. On this occasion the faith of the 
leper and the compassion of the prophet were equal; 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 49 


but the caution to tell no man broke down before 
the natural flow of gratitude. | 

As the healed leper returned from showing him- 
self to the priest, and performing those things for 
his own relief and the protection of the community 
as prescribed by Moses, the news burst from him. 
It spread through all the countryside and forthwith 
the preacher was engulfed again in the rising tide 
of human anguish. It drove him out from the cities 
to the hill places where only the strong could come 
to him. Shepherds heard him as they went with 
their flocks white from the spring shearing to feed 
on the plains of Esdraelon, wood-cutters going up 
toward Hermon, and a continual trickle from the 
towns, for, says the recorder, “‘all men were in ex- 
pectation,” straining toward the last struggle for 
Jewish autonomy. He visited Nazareth, preaching 
the acceptable year of the Lord, and discovered that 
a prophet is not without honor save in his own 
country, for, said the Nazarenes, “Is not this the 
carpenter?” Luke says they hustled him, but I 
find this incompatible with his ironic tolerance. The 
pinch of bitterness was yet to come. 

It was after some weeks of this, when he returned 
to Capernaum, that there occurred the first of those 
encounters with established order which led on to 
his destruction and the final elevation of his message 
above the accidents of flesh. The house to which 


50 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





he had come, not his own, but possibly Peter’s, was 
so thronged with those who wished to hear and so 
besieged from the narrow street without, that it 
was impossible for late comers to have access to him. 
But there was a man sick of the palsy whose desire 
for healing was equaled by his faith in the man 
from Nazareth to accomplish it. If they could 
only get at him! By this times Jesus’ avoidance 
of publicity must have become a matter of general 
knowledge, for the sick man’s friends took no chance 
of meeting the prophet on the public highway. 
They ascended by way of one of the flat, shoulder- 
to-shoulder houses, and from the roof let down the 
bed through the open, middle court which is the 
distinctive feature of Oriental dwellings. 

Now was the wished-for moment when the prophet, 
moved by their faith and taking compassion on the 
sick of the palsy, should say, “‘Take up thy bed 
and walk,” but, lying there with all eyes upon him, 
the expectant sufferer heard a thing even more 
amazing. Said Jesus, “Thy sins be forgiven thee.” 

It is possible that this was more germane to the 
case than appears from the meager account of it; 
whether or no this palsy was one of those nervous 
collapses which are the effect of excess, and had its 
seat deeper in the man’s soul than in his quaking 
body, cannot now be more than suggested. Whether 
the remission of sin was addressed to the sufferer 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 51 


or beyond him to the waiting audience, it did strike 
across and reached the Scribes that, with how much 
of honest inquiry who can guess, had turned out te 
hear the new prophet. A Scribe was in some sort 
a councilor of the law when one of the parties to 
the case was God Almighty. He was versed in all 
minutiz of the scriptures and in nice interpretations. 
It was from the Scribes that the Pharisees derived 
authority for all that punctilious observance by 
the exercise of which they assumed the virtues that 
no longer sprang spontaneously from their barren 
breasts. By a process which may be observed going 
on in our own day among legal interpreters, the 
work of the Scribes had narrowed to the business of 
ascertaining just how far a man may push the 
letter of the law in his favor without incurring any 
of its penalties. Now as they heard this so quietly 
uttered and so extraordinary statement, there ran 
a whisper from one to another: “‘Who can forgive 
sins but God— Oh, blasphemy!” and there was a 
great wagging of turbans. 

“Think you,” said the man from Nazareth, “it is 
easier to say thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say, arise, 
take up thy bed and walk?” 

And getting no answer from them, he continued, 
“That you may know that the son of man has 
power on earth to forgive sins, I say unto thee, arise, 
take up thy bed and go thy way into thine house.” 


52 A SMALL TOWN..MAN 


As the sick man arose and went forth before them 
all, carrying his bed, there went forth with him the 
most revolutionary doctrine which had yet been 
pronounced among men. The son of man has power 
on earth to forge sins. For observe that up to this 
time Jesus had not spoken of himself as the Ap- 
pointed One, nor assumed for himself any character 
but that of preacher of an urgent word. ‘There is 
no evidence that in the title, Son of Man, by which 
he referred to himself, he meant to express anything 
but the merging of his personality in his social 
function; to speak not as Jesus of Nazareth, but as 
heir of all the ages, a fraction of that close-woven 
human fabric of which he at all times warmly felt 
himself a part. Later in his career he was to come 
back to this point and reiterate what was here so 
lightly indicated, the community of power, equally 
accessible to himself and his disciples—‘‘Greater 
things than these shall ye do”—a power which 
even during his lifetime, under his instruction, they 
began to exercise. “‘Man,” he said, “hath power... .” 

It was no new thing for one man, by some process 
not yet fully understood, to reach across to another 
and so stir up the centers of his being as to set back 
the whole course of nature and effect a profound 
reorganization of the physical forces. That such a 
thing can be done is a common and ancient piece 
of human knowledge. But from times older than 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 53 


Israel it has been recognized that deep personal 
disaster can be traced to violations of laws which 
lie beyond the minor infringements of bodily illness 
and are amenable only to the forgiveness of offended 
deity. There is always the chance of evading the 
consequences of such a violation by persuading the 
gods, or by setting them one against another, but a 
small chance and exceedingly uncertain. Pagan 
and Hebrew alike brooded under a sense of inesca- 
pable destiny. 

The doctrine that plain man could by plain man 
his brother be released from spiritual bondage fell 
upon soil so unprepared that twenty centuries of 
harrowing have produced but a few thin sprouts 
from it. By what power resident in man, by what 
paths it is attained, was to be developed as a later 
part of his teaching. The disciples of Jesus per- 
ceived it only as a cloud on the eastern horizon. 
There was the thing before them in its concrete 
example of the man with the palsy, but the prin- 
ciple in its utter simplicity escaped them as the 
perfect pearl eludes the hand by its roundness. 

It is impossible, however, to twist out of this in- 
cident any other meaning than that such release 
should pass from man to man. At that time Jesus 
gave no evidence of thinking of himself as other than 
his companions except in the authority and single- 
ness of his calling; all that he professed was the com- 


54 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


plete interpenetration of what we have agreed to 
call matter and spirit. It was a simpler and more 
direct form of what society begins to practise fum- 
blingly, like a novice with a new instrument,—the 
freeing of man by man: the criminal from the com- 
pulsion of his criminal nature, the obsessed from 
his evil obsession, the incompetent from his incom- 
petency, and, Heaven save the mark! the poor from 
his poverty. About the much more advanced moye- 
ment to free man from the violation of his physical 
nature by means of the spirit that is in him, I say 
nothing. It is among us in a form to admit of per- 
sonal investigation on every side. We are tolerant 
of it as in their day were the Scribes and the Phari- 
sees, and tolerant for the same reason; we know that 
it has been done, but we are unfamiliar with and. 
suspicious of the instrument. It is reported by one 
John Mark, who is described as having written down 
all that he could remember of what Peter told him 
of this occasion, that the launching of this revolu- 
tionary truth was accompanied with nothing more 
than a general amazed comment on the part of the 
Capernaumites that never in their lives had they 
seen things done in this fashion. 
§ 

By this time, which could not have been more 
than six months after his baptism, Jesus appears to 
have broadened the scope of preparation for the 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 55 


kingdom without having lost his sense of its im- 
manence. On the way to his own house after the 
incident of the man sick of the palsy, he passed the 
office of the local tax-collector; one of those minor 
officials to whom the Roman imposition was farmed 
out after a fashion which rendered Rome so ob- 
noxious to conquered nations. It was an office 
hated not only for what it was, but for what it stood 
for in the community; the constant menace of life 
and liberty in an age when death, mutilation, and 
the selling of whole families into slavery were ad- 
judged not too severe punishments for delinquents. 
This Matthew, who from the description of hin as 
“sitting at the receipt of customs” may have been 
a collector of imposts between Galilee and Perea 
which lay along the eastern shore of the lake, had 
not yet been corrupted by his office, for the next 
we hear of him he is sitting at supper with Jesus 
and others of his following. 

It was the custom in Oriental countries, in the 
absence of universities and public forums, for learned 
men to gather about them groups of disciples, sit- 
ting for disquisition on the housetops or at meat 
in the still, cool upper chambers. This was the 
practice of rabbis in Israel, only in Israel there was 
nothing recognized as learning which did not con- 
cern itself with God and human conduct. Gather- 
ings of this sort at the house of Jesus in Capernaum 


56 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


must have been of another sort than the slow, or- 
dered discussions of Hillel and Shamai at Jeru- 
salem, meetings full of hope and high-keyed ex- 
pectation, looking toward the kingdom. 

Simon the Zelot would be there, the impetuous 
Peter, and the two sons of Zebedee, nicknamed the 
Sons of Thunder, those impatient souls who would 
have called down fire from heaven on the villages 
which would not receive the prophet on his journey 
up to Jerusalem. There were also in that company 
Matthew the publican, whose business so discredited 
him with society that his evidence would not be 
taken in court, and other doubtful characters; sitting 
in the head of the board, the carpenter, witty, genial, 
sanguine, seeing Heaven in their midst and the great 
day so close at hand that they would scarcely have 
gone through the cities of Israel before it should be 
upon them. Whatever it was that went on in the 
house of Jesus, it was exciting enough or important 
enough for all Capernaum to be set gossiping 
over it. 

“How is it,” carped the Scribes and Pharisees, 
“that this man sits eating and drinking with low 
fellows, publicans and sinners?”? One suspects that 
the Pharisees had rather adopted the new preacher 
in the beginning—for a prophet might arise—and 
it was more than their sense of prophetic propriety 
which was slighted. But Jesus when he heard of it 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 57 


sent them word that he had come not to cali the 
righteous, but sinners. Said he, “‘They that are 
whole need not a physician; but they that are sick,” 
one of those flashes of gentle irony so characteristic 
of him, for if there was any class in Israel that was 
sick unto death with formalism it was the Scribes 
and Pharisees. But another thing troubled them, 
and in this there was no doubt a measure of honest 
questioning. “John fasted,” they said, “cand the 
Pharisees fast, but why not thy disciples?” 

There must be a special dispensation somewhere 
for those poor souls who would like to know the 
truth, if only they could recognize it in an unfamiliar 
garment. Said Jesus, “Can the children of the 
bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with 
them? ...” Also he said that no man seweth a 
piece of new cloth on an old garment, lest the new 
piece tear away that to which it is sewed and the 
rent is made worse, and no man putteth new wine 
in old bottles, lest the bottles burst and the wine is 
spilled and the bottles marred. It was in this 
fashion that he placed the definite mark of modern- 
ism between himself and the Baptist. Whether or 
not he recognized the fullness of his message and 
its revolutionary character, he at least understood 
that it was a mistake to follow John in attempting 
to pour it into the old Levitical mold. Jesus came 
preaching the Kingdom but with new meanings 


58 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


and new manners. His vision on that point was 
perfectly clear, but the circumstance was too much 
for him. With his new cloth the ancient fabric of 
Hebraism was torn asunder, he poured his new wine 
into as many new bottles as could be found, and still 
the bottles burst. 


Extra - canonical sayings of Jesus from early 
Christian writings, probably genuine, or 
founded on true sayings. 


In whatsoever things I discover you, in these will 
I also judge you.—Justin Martyr. 


Ask the great things and the smal] shall be added 
unto you; ask the heavenly and the earthly shall be 
added unto you.—Clement of Alexander. 


On account of them that are infirm I was in- 
firm, and on account of them that hunger did I 
hunger, and on account of them that thirst did I 
thirst. —Origen. 





On the same day he beheld one working on the 
Sabbath and sard unto him, O man, if thou knowest 
what thou art doing, blessed art thou; but if thou 
knowest not, thou art accursed and a transgressor 


of the law.—Codex Bezae. 


‘ F : 
o Ie YS hee 
y Geet \ 


Tid) beat BA 


VP 





IV 


E shall have to go back to this remedial use 
of the Spirit as between man and man, called 
forgiveness of sins, but we must have more to go 
upon. From the time that Jesus came under the 
influence of John to his declaration of a superior 
freedom of personal conduct, the sequence of events 
is clear, but the preaching is lost tous. That so little 
is recalled as being definitely placed in this period 
would imply that his audiences were small and his 
converts few in number. But at Capernaum he was 
again the object of public attention. He met here 
with that most coveted distinction of the revolu- 
tionist, opposition from the established order. 
Both opposition and interest centered about these 
two points: his neglect of Levitical formalities and 
his work as a healer. It was not that he failed to 
appreciate the value of ceremonial—there is a cus- 
tom of blessing bread before breaking it which is 
mentioned often enough to point the inference that 
Jesus observed it, and we find him paying the temple 
tax and keeping the great festivals of Israel with 


due observance—but he went through the fabric 
61 


62 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


of pharisaical formality like a lion of Judah through 
a net set to catch fieldfares. It was only when he 
felt it enclosing the lesser personalities of his dis- 
ciples that he stooped to justification. That was 
how we find him about the first of June of the year 
that began his ministry, walking with his disciples of 
a Sabbath morning, probably between village and 
village, that he might preach at the morning and eve- 
ning services, and passing on their way the fields of 
standing corn now whitening for the harvest. Per- 
haps the time was all too short for the customary 
midday meal, or the zeal of the preacher sometimes 
outran the nature of the apostles, for they, being 
ahungered, broke off and threshed out between thumb 
and palm the wheaten ears and ate them. 

Now a man might not be condemned under the 
law for failing to fast, but threshing grain on the 
Sabbath ... here at last they had him! Here again 
Jesus defined for his accusers those principles of 
spiritual efficiency which determined all his con- 
duct. “The Sabbath,” said he, “was made for 
man, not man for the Sabbath.’ He also answered 
them a little more in their own key with a scriptural 
reference to what David did in the matter of the 
shewbread in the temple. It is doubtful, however, 
if the exposition cleared the subject levitically any 
more than it confused humanly with this easy com- 
parison of kings and carpenters. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 63 


Silenced they were, but not answered, for we read 
that a little later, possibly on the same Sabbath or 
the next one, he was teaching in the synagogue, and 
a man with a withered hand, posted there for that 
purpose, asked of him a healing. Fully aware of an 
intention to trap him into Sabbath-breaking, for 
which in any notable degree he might be brought 
before the authorities, Jesus turned them face to face 
again with the spirit of that law by the letter of 
which they hoped to snare him. “‘What man of 
you that have a sheep fall into a pit on the Sabbath 
will he not lay hold to lift it out? ... and is not 
man more than a sheep?” There was more from 
the same source, but the Pharisees looked down 
their noses, unable to refute the argument and un- 
willing to admit it. It is the first time of record 
that Jesus showed himself indignant with his au- 
dience; reaching out his hand to the stricken man, 
he lifted him from the pit of his own affliction. 

We who are the inheritors of generations of prej- 
udice against the class who opposed Jesus, need to 
remind ourselves that there is somewhat to be said 
in extenuation. The Pharisees were a people doing 
the best they knew to fulfil what they recognized 
as the supreme obligation—the will of Jehovah. 
Much that they did was done in anticipation of that 
closer union of God and Israel which was to be af- 
fected in the person of the Messiah. They served 


64 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





God as much as they were able and expected God 
to honor the alliance. Now here was this man of 
the common people, putting all their strained con- 
formities to shame, and yet distinguished by God 
with the insigna of a true prophet. Not that they 
cared what the carpenter could do, but if this man 
were truly a prophet-or, as began to be whispered, 
the Messiah, then had God passed them over. How 
the slight must have rankled! Would they believe 
it of God after all their meticulous service? Not 
they! Some other explanation must be found of the 
extraordinary phenomenon, and one was not long in 
forthcoming. 

Shortly after the healing of the withered hand 
on the Sabbath, and possibly to escape the contro- 
versy stirred up by it, Jesus set sail upon Gennesaret 
for the opposite leopard-colored shore of Gadara. 
Here the hills broke off abruptly, full of caves, with 
little ledges of limestone running into the lake and 
little spits of sand breaking the shore. Swineherds 
fed their despised charges hereabouts; the caves 
were inhabited by lepers and the insane. What 
occurred there has come to us so mixed with popular 
superstition of the time that it is impossible to 
thresh out from it the modicum of fact, and perhaps 
not important. It was what people thought had 
happened that affected their attitude toward the 
teacher. It seems, however, that the man from 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 65 


Nazareth was immediately recognized and appealed 
to by one of the most unfortunate of that unfriended 
class, the demoniacs. It was so that all manner of 
mental and nervous derangements were described, 
‘as possession by evil spirits, a belief that Jesus seems 
to have shared. One such very pitiful case was 
healed here on the Gadarean shore under circum- 
stances that excited the utmost superstitious awe 
of him, so much so that deputations came out from 
the cities round about and entreated him to depart 
out of their coasts. 

It was this incident and some others like it which 
gave rise to the charge which was presently brought 
against him, that he cast out demons by the help 
of the very Powers of Darkness. The logic of 
Jesus that a devil casting out devils would be a 
house divided against itself, served not only to 
silence opposition for the moment, but to augment 
the popular favor. All Galilee was aflame. Samaria 
heard of him. He seems almost to have been con- 
strained to accepting the significance of his healing 
at the common estimate, without, however, losing 
his remarkable poise and sanity. 

The daughter of a centurion fell sick—at Caper- 
naum, no doubt, where a garrison was stationed— 
and the Roman, backed by the good word of his 
Hebrew neighbors, dared appeal to Jesus. By the 
time, however, that the prophet had reached the 


66 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


house the child’s condition was such that the rumor 
of her death touched with hysteria the ill-balanced 
Oriental household. To an impostor such an op- 
portunity would have been irresistible. Dead cer- 
tainly; and now behold a miracle! But the man 
from Nazareth, quietly reassuring, passed through 
the crowds of excited. domestics to the inner cham- 
ber. “‘She is not dead,” said he, “but sleeping.” 
Having taken her by the hand and roused her, he 
bade them in a perfectly common-sense manner give 
her something to eat and say no more about it. Out 
of this, which could not be kept entirely private, the 
common tongue multiplied wonders. The tide of 
enthusiasm rose and rolled over all parts of Judea, 
even as far as Idumea. It reached John in his lone- 
ly prison; it rose almost to his own head. 

Crowds poured into Capernaum from the sur- 
rounding country, they thronged him in the street 
if they might so much as touch his garment. Wher- 
ever he moved the sick were laid out along his path, 
happy even to feel his shadow in passing. The tide 
of popular appreciation rose higher; it overflowed 
the narrow streets of the lake town and reached 
even to the hills of Nazareth. His people heard of 
his doings and came down to take him home with 
them. Said they, “He is beside himself.” In noth- 
ing so much have they confirmed the family status; 
it was so exactly like what would be expected of the 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 67 


leading family in a small town who had borne on 
their branches the greatest radical of their time. It 
is the last word as to their entire respectability. 
But Jesus made himself inaccessible in the midst 
of his disciples, and when word was brought to him 
that his brethren were without, seeking for him, he 
answered them, saying, ““Who is my mother or my 
brethren?’ And looking round on those which sat 
about him, he said: “Behold my mother and my 
brethren! For whosoever shail do the will of God 
the same is my brother and my sister and my 
mother.” 

It must have been about this time that John 
called two of his disciples and sent to him, saying, 
“Art thou he that should come, or look we for 
another?” 

Now he that should come was the long-prophesied 
Messiah, the Anointed One, who was to restore the 
kingdom to Israel, concernmg whose advent John 
had borne witness. It was a natural and inevitable 
question. It had been asked of John, who had him- 
self been under no illusion as to the nature of his 
own calling. It was probably already being asked 
under the breath by believers of Jesus. From the 
answer he returned to the Baptist’s inquiry, it seems 
likely that Jesus might have asked it in all humility 
of himself. For his answer when it came, was neither 
an affirmation nor adenial: “‘Go your way,” he said, 


68 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


“tell John what things ye have seen and heard, 
how the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are 
cleansed, the deaf hear, and to the poor the gospel 
is preached!’’ | 

All this is immensely interesting in view of what 
Jesus is known elsewhere to have said and indicated 
as to the relative place of his power to heal in his 
work as a teacher. From the beginning he seems 
to have regarded it as incident to his career rather 
than an integral part of it. He never ascribed it to 
any other power than the uninterrupted working of 
the Father in him. He never thought of it as a gift 
peculiar to himself, but attainable by any man 
who let himself be utterly shone through by the 
spirit that was in Jesus. For its complete operation 
he recognized the necessity of some sort of conjunc- 
tion between the healer and the patient. Ordinarily 
this was accomplished by establishing belief between 
them—the desire to be healed accompanied by the 
firm conviction on both sides that healing was pos- 
sible. “‘Believest thou?” and, “According to thy 
faith be it unto thee,” were his most frequent for- 
mulas; but he did not neglect to assist the faith of 
the applicant by material means when necessary. 
It is related of the first leper that applied to him, 
that Jesus touched him. To touch a leper was not 
only a Levitical defilement, but a practical menace. 
It was because of this liability to contagion that 


A SMALL. TOWN MAN 69 


they were required to go about crying, “‘Unclean, 
unclean!’ in an isolation more terrible than death. 

Nothing then could have been better calculated 
to raise the faith of the unfortunate than that 
fearless human contact. To Jesus the leper was 
clean; and almost immediately he became so to 
himself. 

Later, when his work as a healer appears to have 
been overborne by his message and the unresponsive- 
ness of the community, he used symbolic acts, such 
as touchings, anointings of the eyes, to create that 
rapport between him and his patient which was so 
important to success. Also it is recorded that in 
more than one town he did no mighty work because 
of their unbelief. 

Although he once spoke in reference to a stub- 
born case of possession, of aid to be derived from 
prayer and fasting—he had just come on that oc- 
casion from a long session of spiritual communion— 
he seems never to have related the work of healing 
to any sort of goodness, any preferred frame of 
moral behavior. For we read that at the cleansing 
of the temple, in his most human outburst of in- 
dignation, in that same hour they brought to him 
lame and blind, and he healed them. 

It is also indisputable that Jesus taught that 
healing could be sought by one for another; the 
faith of the parent for the child, of the master for 


70 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





the servant, acted as the solvent of disorder, or, if 
you prefer it, as the conductor of the divine inunda- 
tion. ‘Two or three instances of this sort shall be 
noted in their proper order; we have here to do with 
Jesus’ own opinion as to what his healing powers 
witnessed. He offered them to John as the only 
available evidence, and in the same series, that the 
poor had the gospel preached to them. Is it too 
much to conclude that in offering the facts of his 
ministry rather than its message, his teaching was 
as yet differentiated from John’s only by being an 
extension of it? In a beautiful tribute to the Baptist 
which is reported to us by Luke, he places John at the 
forefront of the tribe of prophets. “Among those 
born of women... notagreater....” Ifitis the case 
that John was the first to teach that the Kingdom 
of God is affected by relations between man and 
man, rather than between man and deity, the judg- 
ment of time would seem to agree with him. “But 
he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater 
than he.” If by this Jesus meant that the man who 
realizes in his daily life that perfect balance between 
man and his neighbor which is the essence of Chris- 
tianity, is greater than he who merely announces it, 
here too history is in accord. John appears to us 
as a man who rather escaped such realization by 
his life in the Wilderness; but his disciple Jesus 
accomplished it. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 71 


This is almost the last we shall hear of the Baptist, 
for it was not far from the time when he should 
lose his life under Herod, the King himself being re- 
luctant, but trapped into beheading him by that 
Herodias whom John’s preaching had so offended. 
It was fitting that this tribute should come from his 
most distinguished convert, and one reads with 
satisfaction that it was received with enthusiasm by 
the disciples of Jesus, many of whom had been 
baptized with John’s baptism. And for the Phari- 
sees and lawyers who rejected the counsel of God 
against themselves, there was one of those brilliant 
thrusts which, while it rendered his critics silent, 
always the more deeply enraged them. Said the 
Master: 


Whereunto shall I liken the men of this generation, 
And to what are they like? 


They are like unto children sitting in the market 
place 

Calling to one another and saying, 

We have piped unto you and ye have not 
danced; 

We have mourned unto you and ye have not 
wept, 


For John the Baptist came 
Neither eating bread nor drinking wine, 


And ye say, He hath a devil; 


72 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


The Son of man is come eating and drinking, 

And ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, a wine- 
bibber, 

A friend of Publicans and sinners. 


But Wisdom is justified of all her children! 


§ 


Among other things accomplished during the 
second stay in Capernaum was the raising of the 
number of his personal following to twelve in re- 
membrance of the twelve houses of Israel. Their or- 
ganization was of the simplest; they had a common 
purse and were the recipients of his most intimate 
teaching. In nothing so much has Jesus shown his 
humanness to be of the same stripe as that of all 
great geniuses as in this selection; for of the twelve, 
one betrayed him and only two or three after his 
death showed any especial aptitude for the dissemina- 
tion of his doctrine. 

But seeing all Israel as sheep lacking a shepherd, 
he seized upon what seemed the likeliest material, 
and within a month or two began to send them 
forth to the cities of Galilee. 

About the end of the barley harvest, if we accept 
the chronology which the color of his speech allows, 
they drew out of the plain of Gennesaret to one of 
those hollow cone-shaped hills of upper Galilee, 
having on its outer rim twin towering peaks like 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 73 


the frontlet of a bull, called the Horns of Hattin. 
It is reached by a foot-path up through the Valley 
of Doves, between thickets of oak and thorn and 
oleander. Here the twelve came for their parting 
instruction, but not unmarked by that crowd of 
miserables who seem to have hung always about his 
path, ready to pounce upon the first faint hope of 
healing. Where the blind and the halt and the sick 
borne in litters were seen moving in any given di- 
rection, there the crowd came hurrying. They 
must have been at it all the warm, star-lighted dusk, 
threading the dim trails, for when Jesus, after a 
night spent in prayer apart on one of the peaks, 
came down into the amphitheater, he found it filled 
with the multitude. Accounts differ as to what he 
said to them, but all agree that the occasion was 
notable and that he met it with a more than ordinary 
accession of preaching power. They agree, too, in 
presenting the sermon delivered between the Horns 
of Hattin as a practical direction for the conduct of 
life rather than a doctrinal disquisition. Something 
of the sort the setting out of the disciples called for: 
and in the manner of coming together of the crowd 
there was evinced a demand for instruction more ex- 
plicit than the mere announcement of the kingdom. 
Time and place had combined to make it the sin- 
cerest and best-selected audience that had yet col- 
lected about the prophet. 


74 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


Whether the things recorded as the sermon on 
the mount were first said there, or elsewhere, or 
whether, as seems likely, they were things said and 
repeated on various occasions, is unimportant. Some 
of them were undoubtedly framed to meet the exi- 
gencies of the twelve on their preaching tours; but 
all in all the discourse stands as the most consistent 
program of Christian character that had yet been 
offered. 

It seems to have begun with a rush to meet the 
unvoiced demand that was made upon the teacher 
by their simply being there at such pains and in 
such numbers, anxious-hearted; by the marks upon 
them of the conditions under which life was lived 
in Palestine, the personal tyrannies, the grinding 
impositions. 

“Blessed are ye, O ye poor,” he cried, “for yours 
is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye that do 
hunger and thirst, for ye shall be filled... .” And 
one whose need was bread heard it as a promise of 
material relief, and whoso thirsted for the things of 
the spirit heard it as pertaining to the Spirit. To 
others who lacked everything it came as the prom- 
ise of the kingdom which was to come only Heaven 
knew how, but very shortly, a proletariat Heaven in 
which the poor were to be rich and the rich poor, 
and everything quite and completely different. 
Taken with other things that he said then and upon 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 75 


later occasions, I can make nothing more or less of 
it than the involuntary expression of his bright be- 
lief in the abundance of God lying open in all things 
to whoever would reach out and seize them. For 
he said again: “Take no thought what ye shall 
eat, nor yet for your body what ye shall put on... 
for if God so clothe the grass of the field. ... O ye 
of little faith!’ And again: “For your Heavenly 
Father knoweth you have need of these things. 
Seek ye therefore the kingdom of God and all these 
things shall be added unto you.” 

All his early teaching was vibrant with this joy- 
ous confidence of the Spirit to compel the flow of 
material things—health, food, and raiment. He 
poured it out here, flashing his discourse now upon 
the twelve and now to the waiting multitude, and 
again sweeping them all into the compass of the 
hand as children of the Father. “Ye are the light 
of the world,” he said. ‘“‘Let your light so shine 
among men....” 

For he was not come to destroy the law, but to 
fulfil it in terms of the thoughts and affections of 
men. ‘They were not to think that the law against 
murder was to be kept by the mere avoidance of 
killing, but by the denial of hate and anger and 
all forms of enmity; it was not alone in inconti- 
nence of the flesh that unchastity consisted, but in 
the lusts of the eye and the imaginations of the 


76 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


heart. This was sterner doctrine to Israel than to 
us after a score of centuries, but the probe went 
even deeper. It struck at the very root of Hebrew 
morality, that austere and measured system of re- 
prisal upon which their civil code was founded, an 
eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Vengeance 
as mine saith the Lord; I will repay; and as they ex- 
pected God to deal with them so dealt they with 
their fellows. “But I say unto you,” ran the new 
teaching, “‘love your enemies, do good to them that 
hate you and pray for them that despitefully use 
you.” 

In the multiplicity of points at which it touched 
their daily life, this was even a more revolutionary 
doctrine than that of the forgiveness of sins. But 
perhaps just because of its nearness they understood 
it better. This can be gathered from the readiness 
with which, after his death had sealed it to them, 
the early Christians practised the new teaching; 
they were not as we are, put at fault by the free 
imagery in which it was stated. 

“Whosoever will smite thee on thy right cheek 
turn to him thy left also,” said Jesus, “and whoso- 
ever shall compel thee to go a mile with him, go 
twain.” But in the different accounts of it the con- 
text of this saying is changed. One suspects some 
crossing here of general principles and the special 
direction intended for the disciples who were about 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 77 


to set out on an errand in which it was important 
that no antagonism should be aroused. Jesus him- 
self always went the second mile with his adver- 
saries, and at the end of it defeated them. The 
whole of that passage beginning “‘resist not evil,” 
reads more like the best example of that spiritual 
astuteness that distinguished him than a declara- 
tion of religious principle. Wise as serpents and 
harmless as doves, they were to find in non-resistance 
the subtlest, completest form of victory. At least 
the passage was never interpreted by the men who 
heard it, as a doctrine of inaction. Both Jesus and 
his disciples were sharp in attack on existing evils, 
fearless in denunciation, not devoid of just wrath, 
and active in proselyting. 

So much of the sermon as we have glanced at was 
constructive. The rest of it was mainly taken up 
with precept and illustration touching the peculiar 
weaknesses of the time, hypocrisy and formalism. 
Alms were to be given in secret, not to be seen of 
men; so also of prayer, which he enjoined on them. 
In the closet with shut door they were to seek the 
Father, and, seeking, they should find; knocking, it 
should be opened unto them. “For if ye, being evil, 
know how to give good gifts to your children, how 
much more shall your Father which is in Heaven 
give good things to them that ask him.” 

These were the sayings of Jesus set down by 


78 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


Matthew and John Mark in answer to the first 
eager cry of converts, ““What shall I do to be saved?”’ 
For there was never any doubt on the part of those 
who listened to Jesus and his disciples that partici- 
pation in the kingdom was dependent upon a 
changed conduct, “Except your righteousness ex- 
ceed the righteousness of the Scribes and Phari- 
sees... and again, “Not every one that heareth, but 
he that doeth the will of my Father.” That is why, 
perhaps, we have in the gospels so much of specific 
direction and less than we would gladly hear of the 
spiritual illumination from which it proceeds. For 
it is impossible not to realize how little resemblance 
there is between the God of love whom Jesus came 
preaching and the Jehovah of the Hebrew scriptures, 
jealous, capricious, avenging, worshiped with bloody 
rites at Jerusalem, with scapegoat and sin-offering 
and burnt-offering of bullocks and of rams. It was 
not in either of the great Jewish sects that he found 
the doctrine of man in God and God in man, as im- 
plied in the terms of kinship used by Jesus. Yet 
in none of the gospels is it set down as a new doctrine, 
nor was the preacher ever called to account for it. 
Though there is some reason to believe that he re- 
garded it as an important part of his mission to 
make known the true nature of God, Jesus himself 
never explained when or by what means he had 
come by the revelation. It was one of those truths 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 79 


which lie at the bottom of the deep wells of human 
understanding, so native to its element, so intrinsic 
that, once realized, it is not thought of as requiring 
explication. With something of the same sim- 
plicity with which it was offered, the fatherliness of 
God was accepted. But your true Oriental is al- 
ways a mystic. It was easier for him to realize 
that “no man knoweth the Father save only the 
son’’—that is to say, that only by the God-in-man 
is the God-beyond-man apprehended—than it was 
to understand how the kingdom of God could be 
set up in Israel without the physical overthrow of 
the Roman Empire. The sermon on the mount 
instructed those who heard it in the sort of behavior 
which at the same time fitted for the approaching 
kingdom of heaven and provided a way of escape 
from destruction, but in respect to the scope and 
manner of that kingdom when it should come, it 
left them exactly where it found them. 


Ng oP 
Pop a 
ay aby } ¢ 
‘1h; 
fn) hey ie 

PAWS Y 


+ ve WE 
‘ So Cd 


ii sciwe 
bate 


ta ie 
Ny 


ai? 


(i 


Me as 
Levey) pre itas 


vay 





if ‘ Dit) Hi a 
G i ae ed, ey bi) we ts Ph 


Give not that which is holy unto dogs 
Neither cast your pearls before swine, 
Lest hafly the swine trample them under foot 
And the dogs turn and rend you. 
—Matt. vii, 6, 


By their fruits ye shal] know them. 
Do men gather grapes of thorns? 
Or figs of thistles? 
Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit 
But the corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit: 
A good tree can not bring forth evil frutt, 
Neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. 
Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit 
Is hewn down and cast into the frre. 

Therefore by their fruits ye shall know them. 

—vu, 16-20. 


Nlo servant can serve two masters: 
For either he will hate the one 
And love the other; 
Or else he will hold to one 
And despise the other. 


He can not serve God and Mammon. 
—Luke xvi, 13. 


[Original form of sayings of Jesus. Arranged by Richard 
G. Moulton.] 






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V 


F what happened to the twelve on their tour, 

who heard and who reviled them, there is not 
so much as a tradition. They went forth to do as 
they saw Jesus doing—to teach, to heal, and to cast 
out devils; at no point was the business of the dis- 
ciple distinguished from that of the master. It was 
evident from the instruction they received that 
they were not to go far nor to remain long; they 
came again and told all that they had done. 

Of what happened to Jesus in the interim there is 
even less, unless we place in this period some in- 
cidents not otherwise located except by the logic 
of circumstance. Of these the most significant was 
the supper at the house of a Pharisee. It seems 
more probable that after his return from the moun- 
tain, rid of his immediate following, men of no very 
great refinement of manner if the truth must be 
told, certain of the Pharisees who had been at- 
tracted by his doctrine but repelled by his want of 
conformity, would again attempt to put themselves 
in sympathy with the prophet. 

One did so attempt by inviting him to his house 

83 


84 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


for a meal; and while it was in progress, possibly 
in the open court, for it was now full summer, the 
guests reclining in the Roman manner—for so it 
was the custom of the Jews at their feasts to assume 
the postures of free men~-there came a woman into 
the room and stood behind the Master. She stood 
there weeping in the-dusk; her tears fell upon his 
feet, and she wiped them with her hair. They could 
see her in the flare of the tall lamps, wiping his feet 
and kissing them, and presently the air of the place 
began to be filled with perfume, delicate and costly. 
Then the Pharisee said in his heart, for he knew her, 
“If this man were a prophet”’—for he was by no 
means sure—“he would know what manner of 
woman this is, for she is a sinner,” but though it 
was his own house, he dared not be the first to speak 
of it. 

He watched for some movement of withdrawal on 
the part of his guest, from the defiling presence, but 
instead he found himself addressed. 

“Simon, I have somewhat to say to thee.” 

“Say on, Master.” 

Said Jesus: “‘There was a certain creditor had 
two debtors, the one of whom owed five hundred 
pence, the other fifty, and when they had nothing 
to pay, he frankly forgave them both. Tell me 
therefore, which of them will love him most.” 

“I suppose he to whom he forgave most.’”’ Simon 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 85 


was ready enough with the answer, but he saw not 
where the question tended. 

At the beginning he had omitted those attentions 
which were due an honored guest, fearing, perhaps, 
to commit himself too much. The man might be a 
prophet, in which case it were well to have enter- 
tained him, but still— And now his guest was 
pointing out to him that it was the woman who had 
supplied the missing hospitality, the ceremonial 
washing, the kiss of welcome, the anointing. 

**Wherefore,” said the Master, “her sins are for- 
given, for she hath loved much; but he to whom 
little is forgiven, the same loveth little.” And to 
the woman he said: “Go in peace; thy sins be for- 
given thee.” This was the way he took to turn 
even the slights of his adversaries to advantage in 
the spread of his doctrine. It was also one of the 
things that was remembered against him. 

How else he spent the time of his disciples’ ab- 
sence cannot be so much as guessed, unless he spent 
a part of it in his mother’s house at Nazareth. The 
last we hear of his family was on the occasion of 
their visit to him at Capernaum, when, if he received 
them at all, it was not until after they had been 
made to feel that their claim upon him was less than 
that of more ardent believers. And the next we 
hear is that Mary his mother, and possibly a brother, 
are in the group that followed him up to Jerusalem. 


86 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


James was martyred for his sake, and the grandsons 
of Jude confessed him as Christ before the Emperor 
Domitian. 

There must have intervened between these, some 
occasion on which his family had leisure to hear and 
be converted by him, and this is the only unac- 
counted-for interval of his ministry. 

It would probably have been during this period 
of retirement that the news reached him of how the 
daughter of Herodias had danced the head of John 
the Baptist off his shoulders and on to a silver 
charger, otherwise there would have been some 
public question raised by it. And if he were not 
where I suppose him, then he was more than likely 
where we read that he was often to be found, apart 
in the hills and desert places at prayer. 

It is not because the soul of man is less importu- 
nate, but only because it is immensely more fluent 
than the physical habit, that his religious practices 
take their cast from his daily living. Ordinarily the 
spirit accommodates itself to trifles of custom and 
expedient as a stream to the pebbles in its bed, flowing 
over and around them; it 1s only in freshets that 
they are carried utterly away. The essential teach- 
ings of the man Joshua Ben Joseph cut a wide, 
free channel for the spiritual aspirations of the 
time, but his private religious observances were 
largely shaped by contemporaneous Hebrew usage. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 87 


The pagan carried his gods with him. Every 
place in which he elected to set up his altars became 
sacred, fit for worship or expiation; but to the Jew 
there was but one holy place, even the mount of 
Jerusalem. Only between the horns of the great 
altar could sacrifice be acceptably made. But ever 
since the Captivity of Babylon there had been, in 
whatever place Jews of the dispersion were congre- 
gated, meeting-houses where the books of the law 
were kept and matters pertaining to their religion 
could be discussed. These synagogues in the time 
of Jesus, when the temple worship was still the 
dominant feature of Hebraism, had even less of 
sanctity than attaches to them since the destruction 
of Jerusalem; they were used only on Sabbaths and 
commemorative occasions. All the treasures of re- 
ligious association were still with the grass and the 
rain, the wild hills and the swelling of Jordan. 
Wealthy Jews had closets for personal devotions, 
rooms dedicated to reading and meditation, little 
kiosks on the housetops, looking toward Jerusalem; 
but in the crowded warrens of the poor there were 
no such privacies. Any man among them subject 
to visitation of the Spirit must have turned instinct- 
ively toward those places where of old God had 
visited Abraham, Elijah, and Isaiah. It is impossible 
not to conclude that to the circumstances of great 
light and space in which he received it, quite as 


88 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


much as to the compulsory co-operations and inter- 
dependence of poverty from which he came, we 
owe the spacious social character of the teaching 
of Jesus. 

Above the plain of Gennesaret lie the orchards; 
first the olives with the vines between; above the 
olives the figs; above the figs the apricots, almonds, 
walnuts. Beyond the orchards the wild jungle 
begins —oak and thorn and terebinth; at last 
the “trees of God,” spired fir and fan-spread 
cedar. 

Here the charcoal-burner’s hut would have shel- 
tered him, or one of those low stone sheds used by 
the shepherds at lambing-time. At this latitude the 
sky retains its blueness on until midnight, the stars 
are not pricked in on one plane, but draw the eye 
to the barred door of space. A man praying here 
all night on one of these open hill-fronts might think 
he heard them swinging to their stations, might hear 
without any fancying, the heavy surge of the Medi- 
terranean roll up along the western buttress of the 
Bridge. At dawn the fishing fleet would break out 
of the lake towns like doves out of a dove-cote, and 
caravans, starting early to avoid the heat of the 
day, begin to crawl along the Wadi el Haman. 
Hours such as this God flowed into him, filled and 
overfilled him. 

And with all his being so filled and foaming with 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 89 





the new wine of his gospel, he retained the shape 
he had from the potter. 

He was a small-town man and no world-builder. 
He preached the Kingdom of God, knowing God for 
a spirit and having an increasing realization of the 
kingdom as a state of being. But he had no pro- 
gram. He followed the inward voice, and followed 
it instinctively with the freedom of a river in its 
natural channel, with no fretting of the flesh. But 
where the voice left him uninformed he was simply 
a man from Nazareth; his social outlook was the 
outlook of a villager. 

Formerly, great prophets of Israel had come out of 
the Wilderness; their words were full of the terrible 
things—thunders, earthquakes, fire on the moun- 
tains. But the words of Jesus are all of the small 
town: the candle and the bushel, the housewife’s 
measure of yeast, the children playing in the street. 
The rich he knew only as the poor and the oppressed 
know them; the kings of his parables were the kings 
of fairy-tale and legend, such kings and potentates 
as make the stock of the village story-teller. His 
very way of speaking was a folk way, the pithy 
sentence, the pregnant figure. He saw God reflected 
in every surface of the common life and taught in 
parables which are, after all, but a perfected form of 
the quizzes and riddles dear to the unlettered wit. 
That is why so many of them are remembered while 


90 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


his profounder sayings escaped his hearers. It is 
evident from the form of these, blunted as they are 
by retranslation, that they were, many of them, cast 
in the matched and balanced sentences of Hebrew 
verse, which accounts in part for their easy retention. 

He was a man wise in life, but unlearned. He 
read no books but the scriptures; wrote nothing, took 
the folk way of transmitting his teaching from mouth 
to mouth and trusted God for the increase; and he 
had the folk way in his profoundest speech, of 
identifying himself with the Power that used him. 
He dramatized all his relations to the Invisible. 
With it all he was a Jew of the circumcision. He 
grew up beyond Judaism as a stalk of grain grows 
from its sheath, but never out of it. Always to his 
death, it was there about the roots of his life. At 
Capernaum, when the centurion had come to him, 
touching the illness of his servant, it had been 
thought necessary to explain that the soldier had 
been good to the Jews and had built them a syna- 
gogue. In the sending of his disciples he had ex- 
plicitly directed them not to go into Samaria. His 
final illumination on this point he took with that 
extraordinary spiritual efficiency which distinguished 
him; equally with John the Baptist he understood 
that many should come in from strange lands and 
sit down with the children of Abraham and Isaac 
and Jacob. But the stalk had not yet overtopped 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 91 


its sheath when the returning twelve met him at the 
appointed rendezvous, which was probably Caper- 
naum. 

From what follows, one judges that the teaching 
of the disciples must have been attended with a 
measure of success. From this time on until he de- 
liberately disappointed it, public expectation ran 
high. What with the coming and going, Jesus and 
the twelve were so beset that they found it neces- 
sary to withdraw some little distance out of the city 
along the lake shore, but the people marked where 
they went and, outrunning the boat, gathered about 
them again as sheep about a shepherd. Here, after 
he had preached to them, occurred one of those 
ebullitions of religious excitement which gave rise 
to the incident known as the miracle of the loaves 
and fishes. Popular enthusiasm is an excellent 
medium for miracle tales to ripen in. What prob- 
ably happened was that the multitude were so fired 
by hope of the kingdom that they forgot their hunger 
and hung about until Jesus, having first dismissed 
his disciples toward Bethsaida upon the ship, sent 
them away. It was the plan, no doubt, to rejoin the 
twelve after he had refreshed himself on the moun- 
tain, as his custom was after any notable effort, by 
deep draughts of prayer. And along in the fourth 
watch of the night his disciples, being on the sea 
and the moon shining, saw him come walking on the 


92 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


water as though he would have passed them. But 
they, thinking him a spirit, cried out in alarm until 
he spoke to them and came into the ship and com- 
forted them. So Mark sets down what he recalled 
of what Peter told him. 

There was an earlier incident still of the crossing 
of this same lake, on the night before the healing of 
the demoniac which led to their being avoided by 
the cities of Gadara. On that occasion a storm 
arose—one of those sudden flaws of wind whirling 
down from Hermon to be sucked into the Rift of 
Jordan. ‘They would spring up all in an instant, 
beating the lake from jade to blue and silver and then 
white with spume, and as suddenly die away again. 
But while the clumsy fishing-craft labored in the 
teeth of it Jesus slept until the boatmen, at the last 
gasp of their strength and skill, cried to him, “‘Mas- 
ter, help or we perish.” Immediately, when he was 
awakened, he said to them, “Why are ye fearful, O 
ye of little faith?’’ and also he said, “‘ Peace, be still,” 
and the wind fell off, and the ship righted. All of 
which can be explained away by anybody who finds 
himself endowed with the kind of mind which de- 
mands it. Did Peter really tell Mark that Jesus 
walked on the water or that he walked along it, along 
the shallow, tideless beach, so lost in meditation that 
it was not until they called to him from the boat, 
anchored a few feet offshore, that he was aware of 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 93 


them? Had he been there all the night, walking by 
the still waters, instead of on the mountain where 
they supposed him? Peter should have known, but 
certainly 2f he knew, it took more than a miracle of 
walking on the water to keep Peter faithful at 
the crisis at Jerusalem. After all, what a miracle 
needs for its acceptance, is demonstration rather 
than argument. We believe the miracles of heal- 
ing because we have known of cures being accom- 
plished in our own day, and we do not believe 
in walking on the water, because it isn’t done among 
our acquaintances. Such incidents as these are told 
of all prophets, as a symbol of the extension of their 
powers over fields felt to be within man’s province, 
but as yet beyond his capacity. 

What actually did happen was that the ship, 
instead of making port at Bethsaida as had been 
planned, was blown out of its course back to the 
coast of Galilee. Here the very thing that Jesus 
had sought to avoid at Capernaum awaited him. He 
was immediately recognized and beset by the sick 
borne in litters, and by throngs struggling only for 
the touch of his garments. Many that touched him 
were made whole by the faith that was in them, but 
it is notable here that he is not said to have healed 
anybody purposefully. From this time forth he 
showed a tendency deliberately to avoid the work 
of healing as an impediment to his preaching career. 


94. A SMALL TOWN MAN 


There is a hint in the gospel narrative that at this 
juncture, when his popularity in the thickly popu- 
lated plain of Gennesaret had reached its height, 
there was a tentative attempt to put him at the 
head of some sort of organized revolution, an attempt 
which he evaded. ‘This would account for several 
things that followed in the interim between the re- 
turn of the twelve and the journey up to Jerusalem. 
It accounts for the falling away of the disappointed 
populace, and for the secrecy which was maintained 
as to his movements afterward. He might have 
wished to avoid another popular demonstration, so 
uncomprehending, and his frequent trips across the 
border of Galilee might easily have been to escape 
the attention of Herod, who at this time certainly 
heard of him and began to wonder if this might not 
be John the Baptist come to life again to vex him. 

About this time we read of Pharisees coming all 
the way from Jerusalem to see and question. They 
found for their first item that he and his disciples 
ate with unwashed hands; that is to say, that they 
omitted the ceremonial symbol of cleansing before 
meat. Attempting a rebuke, they found themselves 
rebuked in turn, and that roundly, convicted of lip 
service, of hypocrisy, of neglecting the command- 
ments of God in favor of their traditions, making 
clean the outside of the cup and the platter, but in- 
wardly full of ravening and wickedness. He cried 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 95 


woe unto them for the tithing of mint and cumin 
and passing over the judgment and the love of God; 
woe for that they loved the chief seats in the syna- 
gogue and greetings in the market. “‘ Woe unto you 
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, ye are as graves 
which appear not, and men that walk over them are 
not aware of them!” So are they who are under the 
influences of Pharisees, defiled by unsuspected cor- 
ruption. 

And one of the lawyers, those whose business it 
was to draw out of the scriptures interpretations to 
suit the exigencies of his clients, said, “Master, say- 
ing this thou reproachest us also.’”? And Jesus an- 
swering, said: 

“Woe unto you also, ye lawyers... for you build 
sepulchers to the prophets, and your fathers killed 
them.” With much more in the same strain to the 
effect that the blood of all the prophets should be 
required of their generation. “For,” said he, re- 
ferring to their method of distorting the scriptures 
to their advantage, “Ye have taken away the key 
of knowledge; ye entered not in yourselves’’—into 
the understanding of God, he meant—“and those 
that were entering ye hindered.” 

Then he called the people to him and deliberately 
tore across the whole fabric of Levitical cleansing 
which held the theory and practice of Pharisaism 
together. Once for all he rid his name people of 


96 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


the accumulated tradition which reduced the proc- 
ess of daily living to a formula in the effort to avoid 
defiling or being defiled. “For there is nothing 
without a man,” taught Jesus, “‘which entering into 
a man can defile him, but the things which come out 
of him .. . for out of the heart of men proceed evil 
thoughts . . . thefts, covetousness, deceit, lascivious- 
ness... all these things come from within and defile 
a man.” 

It was a pronouncement which had effects far 
reaching in the organization of his followers after his 
death, and carried them beyond what Jesus himself 
found necessary; it became, in fact, the door through 
which the gospel passed to the Gentiles. 

But he had struck at a very tender part in the 
armor of Pharisaical respectability, and from this 
time on he became the special mark of their ani- 
mosity, seeking always to provoke him to the point 
at which the law might take hold of him. It had 
something to do, no doubt, with the privacy of his 
movements; though that would have found sufh- 
cient excuse in the wish to instruct and prepare his 
disciples for the work which now, by divine intuition, 
he saw shaping dimly before them. Leaving Beth- 
saida, he is heard of in the parts of Dalmanutha and 
in the borders of Magadan; he journeyed to Tyre 
and Sidon. Here he was in a region predominately 
Gentile and, until his return from Cesarea-Philippi, 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 97 


out of the jurisdiction of Herod. He went unrecog- 
nized for the most part, and undeclared; but a man 
so marked as Jesus, attended by twelve who pay 
him the deepest attention and reverence, cannot 
always be hid. Near Dalmanutha Pharisees came 
forth again, this time demanding a sign. His dis- 
ciples being of the masses and distrusting all aristoc- 
racies either of manners or morals, thought they 
came to tempt him, but Jesus understood them bet- 
ter. His scorn licked them like a flame, “‘Hypo- 
crites, thinking to discern the sky and not able to 
read the signs of the times!” which showed that he 
had been reading them himself to some purpose; 
but to their wicked and adulterous generation no 
sign should be given, save the sign of the prophet 
Jonas, the sign of their own degeneracy which called 
for a signal handling from God. On two or three 
occasions during this journey, compassion broke 
down his reluctance to heal, though more than ordi- 
nary precautions were taken to prevent the healing 
from being known. It is notable that on these 
oceasions, lacking the flux of a popular belief in 
him, he sometimes reinforced his method by sym- 
bolic touchings and an application to the eyeballs 
of the blind. 

On his journey into Tyre and Sidon one incident 
preserved to us shows the gradual widening of his 
mind to the world outside of Jewry. In one of the 


98 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


cities where he concealed himself he was recognized 
by a Syrophcenician woman who would have had 
him cast forth a devil out of her daughter. “‘But,” 
said Jesus, “let the children first be filled; it is not 
meet to take the children’s bread and cast it unto 
the dogs.” There spoke the Nazarene and the 
Hebrew, thinking of the chosen people. “Yea, 
Lord,” the woman answered him in his own figure, 
“but the dogs under the table eat of the children’s 
crumbs.” And the answer pleased him, for though, 
as in the case of the centurion, he had not found 
such faith in Israel, he honored it when he found it. 
§ 

They would have been a month or two at this 
business, holding on until late in November, if, as I 
think, 1t was the advent of the early rains which 
turned them east and south from Cesarea-Philippi. 
They passed over Ephraim; on the plains of Phe- 
nicia they smelled the sea. Toward Sidon they 
heard it pounding, saw between the low coast hills 
its white hands cast up. MHereabout they struck 
into the great coast road passing between Surrepta 
and Sidon, followed it as far as the gorge of Litany, 
perhaps—for it is not stated that they entered into 
either of the cities—and, climbing the sharp comb 
of hills between that and the upper Jordan, dropped 
down to Cesarea-Philippi. For the most part it 
was pleasant going, past high, well-watered valleys 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 99 


and woods of maple, oak, and bay. In the neigh- 
borhood of cities more Roman than Galilee they 
saw instruments of ignominious execution set up, 
and those melancholy processions . . . the criminal 
bearing his cross, whipped forth by the soldiery, 
and following afar off, the rabble, curious and 
scoffing. 

They would put in awhile at sequestered villages, 
preaching perhaps, to such select few as were able 
to hear the Word, and then to the road again, where 
they slept at ancient khans, at shepherds’ huts, and 
many a night all open to the stars. They ate such 
food as they bought at the wayside, rough, wild figs 
of the sycomore, and parched grain gleaned in the 
fields. They would sit Eastern fashion on the 
ground, and, each making his little fire of the stalks, 
and threshing out the scorched ear in the hand, 
they would wash down the half-cooked grain with 
wine from a goatskin bottle, while they talked of 
things pertaining to the kingdom. At the end of 
the long twilight there would come a moment when, 
with heads bowed and covered, there would run a 
reverent murmur about the camp—dHear, O Israel, 
the Lord thy God is one Lord. . . . The immemorial 
declaration of the Shema. 

Art has done too much for this man, to paint him 
forever tried, scourged, forever a-dying. He was 
not only a man of the small towns, but of the hills, 


100 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


the open road. He is seen at his best here, striding 
a little ahead of his companions, bronzed, hardy. 
the turban off to catch the mountain coolness, the 
long hair blown backward from the rapt countenance, 
and over him a higher heaven than had yet lifted 
upon man. Of the twelve or fourteen months which 
scholars allow to his ministry, how much of it was 
spent out of cover! At the preaching of John in 
the Rift of Jordan, on the mount of the Wilderness, 
in the hills back of Gennesaret, on the road to Cesa- 
rea-Philippi, sleeping under the oaks at Gethsemane. 
Nothing else accounts so readily for his preoccupa- 
tion with the natural rather than the institutional 
relations of men. 

It was in this fashion he came to Philip’s hand- 
some capital. Philip the Tetrarch was as much of 
a Jew as a brother of Herod Antipas could be, and 
Perea was a district counted to Israel, though its 
influences were largely Greek. The citadel, from 
its rocky promontory, overlooks the wheat-fields 
and the mulberry-trees of the upper Jordan valley. 
Here full born from its basalt cavern, sacred to the 
god of the Beast-in-man, springs Israel’s sacred 
river. Close to the spot where the faith of the God- 
in-man received its earliest formative impulse, still 
it wets with its spray between the wild rose and the 
honeysuckle, Pan’s ancient altar. It is not recorded 
that Jesus entered Cesarea-Philippi, but he remained 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 101 


in the vicinity long enough to be recognized and 
sought for healing, and for the great change which 
had long been foreshadowed in the character of 
his ministry to reach its full development. For 
it was here that Jesus put to the twelve a question 
which must have been shaping in his own mind 
ever since the early summer, when John had first 
put it to him by the mouth of two of his own disciples. 

“Whom do men say that I am?” 

And they answered him: “John the Baptist. 
But some say Elias, and others, One of the Proph- 
ets.” For it was always in the minds of Israel that 
the True-Speaking could pass in and out of Life 
and come again. Jesus held them steadily to the 
question. ‘ 

““Whom say ye that I am?” And Peter, the im- 
petuous, burst out with the faith that burned in 
him, “Thou art the Christ.” 

Then said Jesus, “‘Blessed art thou, Simon Bar- 
jona, for flesh and blood hath not revealed to thee, 
but my Father which is in Heaven.” 

It must have been here, and by the help of what 
he accepted as a revelation on the part of his dis- 
ciples, that Jesus settled for himself much that must 
have seemed difficult and perplexing in his own ex- 
perience. He had begun the preaching of the King- 
dom of God at hand as a joyous certainty, a common 
heritage of the time, his only by a short priority 


102 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


of announcement. Feeling his knowledge of these 
things only a small part of what might be gathered 
up by any sincere soul who addressed himself to such 
discovery, he had come, as do all prophets and poets, 
to find it looked upon with suspicion by the multi- 
tude, a strange and singular thing, misunderstood 
and misrated. 

As his revelation increased in him, together with 
his knowledge of the want of it in others, he saw 
even between himself and his chosen intimates a 
gulf immeasurable. It is at this point that genius 
falters. Sometimes in sheer terror of being alone 
with its message, it fails altogether, or weakly turns 
back to seek in human relations a surcease of strange- 
ness. But Jesus, finding himself so much in ad- 
vance of his time that twenty centuries have scarcely 
caught up with him, found himself unaffrighted be- 
cause not wholly without direction. Woven out of 
the faith of his race, by a long line of prophets, the 
mantle of Messiahship waited for him who could 
fulfil it. It cannot be said that at any time until 
the very last day of his life Jesus publicly assumed 
it, but from this time forth he went clothed in the 
certainty of harmony between himself and the ex- 
pectation of the ages. Though his time rejected him, 
he became a part of all times in as much as he was a 
figure of prophecy. The feeling of being prepared 
for and expected satisfied, for the man of Nazareth, 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 103 


that sense of belonging, the hunger for which frets 
great souls to their undoing. 

That the incident stood both in his mind and that 
of his disciples for a definitely changed relationship 
appears at once. When he had charged them that 
they should make none of these things known, he 
began to teach them how it was that he should go 
up to Jerusalem, and what things he should suffer 
there. Certainly he must have carried these things 
in his mind for some time before he spoke of them; 
finding no way to reconcile them with his first 
joyous prevision of the kingdom, until he had ac- 
cepted himself in the light of a fulfilment of proph- 
ecy. That his disciples found them utterly irrec- 
oncilable with any conception they had of him 
appears from Peter’s hasty, “Far be it from thee, 
Lord; this shall not be unto thee.” But even Peter, 
reminded in his turn that he smelled of the things of 
men rather than of God, could hardly have under- 
stood what followed. For Jesus, calling the people 
to him, and his disciples, also, said: “Whosoever will 
come after me, let him deny himself and take up 
his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save 
his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life 
for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it. 
For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the 
whole world and lose his own soul? .. .” 

Other things he said which, as they afterward re- 


104 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


called, referred more explicitly to the fate which 
was even then preparing for him. But it seems 
hardly possible it could have been clearly indicated 
or at all understood, for when the blow fell it found 
them wholly unprepared. In the light of what oc- 
curred later, they harked back to interpret what he 
had said. At the time, other things better remem- 
bered drove it from their minds. 

Some days after Peter’s ready declaration, Jesus 
took him, together with James and John, high and 
apart on the mountain for one of those sessions of 
silent prayer to which he owed his spiritual suste- 
nance. 

Hermon draws up out of the plain of the upper 
Jordan as the roots of a great oak lift out of the 
ground. The land is filled with the sound of run- 
ning waters; full-born rivers leap from limestone 
caves and go roaring toward the Rift. The shrub 
is close-leaved here; at intervals great trees stand 
up; they reach the borders of perpetual snows. 

On this occasion the little company must have 
climbed up beyond the tree-line into the region of 
the stony waste before Jesus drew aside for his hour 
of communion. Wearied sooner at their own de- 
votions, humbly his disciples watched him. While 
he prayed they saw the fashion of his countenance 
change, grow white and shining, and a bright cloud 
overshadowed them. ‘These were very simple souls 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 105 


to whom undreamed-of things may happen. While 
Jesus was wrapt from himself did a white flash of 
his burning spirit strike across to them? Such things 
are possible. Or was it the alpen glow, that most 
transcendent of all the visible manifestations of God, 
flooding down from Hermon, touching all things with 
its divine transfiguration? They were fishermen of 
the low, lake region to whom the stained air laving 
the peaks of the mountains was as strange as splen- 
did. It spoke to them as all beauty of nature speaks 
to the devout, of God. Bathed in it, they saw their 
Messiah as it became all true Jews to see him, radi- 
ant between the Law and the Prophets, in the 
figures of Moses and Elias. 

Coming down from the heights, touched with awe 
of the celestial wonder, they ventured a timid ques- 
tion. “Why,” said they, “do the Scribes say that 
Elias should come first?’ For if this was truly the 
Christ of prophecy, there wanted somewhat to the 
fulfilment. 

Said Jesus, “Elias is already come, but they knew 
him not and did unto him whatsoever they listed.” 
By which they understood him to refer to John the 
Baptist. More is reported of the same character, 
but all too much colored by what happened in the 
interval between the writing and the recording to 
be veridical. It is enough, however, to define the 
path by which their thoughts traveled to the idea 


106 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


of Jesus and his teaching which finally possessed 
them. 

There was a longer road still, in which they were 
to reconcile the person of the crucified carpenter 
with the glorious figure of the Messiah limned upon 
the Hebrew consciousness, but from this time forth 
we see Jesus held to the perfect poise by the knowl- 
edge of what God expected of him. He was not the 
first man nor the last to perish for the Word, but 
this was unique in him, that he never doubted nor 
repented. And if he saw in himself the fulfilment 
of prophecy, the Anointed one of Israel, who shall 
gainsay him? If he was not the Messiah the Jews 
expected, he was at least the only one they ever 


had. 


And it shall come to pass when he has brought 
low everything that 1s in the world, 

And has sat down in feace for the age on the throne 
of his kingdom, 

‘Then joy shall be revealed, 

And rest shall affear! 


Then healing shall descend in dew, 

And disease shall withdraw, 

And anxiety and anguish and lamentation fass from 
amongst men, 


And gladness proceed through the whole earth. 
And wild beasts shal] come forth from the forest 


and minister unto men, 
And asfs and dragons shal] come forth from their 


holes to submit themselves to a hittle child. 


And it shall come to pass in those days that the reafer 
shal] not grow weary, 

Nor those that burld be toilworn, 

For the works shall of themselves speedily advance, 

Together with those who do them in much tran- 
quillity. 


[From the Apocalypse of Baruch, a Jewish work of the last 
half of the first century, which strongly influenced the style 
of the synoptic gospels.] 





VI 


ND if not the Messiah of expectation, how then 
did he succeed in fulfillmg the prophecy with- 
out satisfying the dream? His message he knew to 
be Messianic, but that he himself fell short in some 
particulars of the long-cherished ideal seems to be 
indicated in the last clause of the message he sent 
to John, “Blessed is he that finds no occasion of 
stumbling in me.” Here we see the man from 
Nazareth imposing his Levitical training on the 
prophet. Thus and so Messiah was to come; and 
yet here was the saving Word delivered in quite 
other ways. 

The one feature irreconcilable between the in- 
heritance and the revelation of Jesus was the estab- 
lishment of the kingdom. This was to be the work 
of the Messiah, and it is probable that when Jesus 
began to preach his early coming—before they had 
gone through the cities of Israel—he was thinking 
of a person quite apart from himself. The growth 
of the idea that he himself was the fulfilment of 
prophecy was shown in him; it did not reach him 


much in advance of the certainty that if he was to 
109 


110 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


restore the kingdom to Israel, it was not to be in his 
own time and his own flesh. He was to prepare for 
it by revealing the true nature of the Father and 
establishing kinship between God and man. He 
was to reorganize the thoughts and affections of 
men in the Spirit and in Love. But more and more 
as he felt on all sides the pressure of Roman empiry, 
of established governmental and economic systems, 
he realized the necessity of breaking up the mold 
of society, of pouring its fluid stuff into lines more 
in conformity with his revelation of Brotherhood in 
man. ‘To speak in our tongue, Jesus accepted the 
idea of social revolution without any clear notion 
of how it was to be accomplished. ‘The entrance 
of the individual into the kingdom was a maiter 
of personal spiritual regeneration, to which Jesus 
held the key. The setting up of the great com- 
mandment as a human institution, lay in a region 
beyond the reach of his most poignant revelation. 

But again, this was to be the work of the Messiah, 
and if Jesus were the Christ, then his work somehow, 
in some fashion. And Jesus was to die. Of this he 
seems to have been certain from Cesarea-Philippi 
forward; intimations of his end thickened as the 
time drew on. Casting about for the solution of 
these apparently irreconcilable conditions, he fixed 
upon the common belief in the return of the prophets. 
How readily Israel could accept such passage in and 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 111 


out of death is seen in their question about John the 
Baptist. John was Elias and Jesus was John come 
again. And if Jesus were Christ, why should not 
a second coming, not in the flesh, but with Power, 
show forth the wonders that the first had missed? 
In some such fashion the man from Nazareth worked 
out his incompleted revelation. 

Something had been accomplished by the tempo- 
rary withdrawal of Jesus from the cities of Genne- 
saret. Once for all he had cleared himself from any 
movement which had for its objective the taking of 
the kingdom of heaven by violence. His work of 
healing was definitely relegated to a secondary place. 
Disappointed of this transitory hope, the rabble fell 
away, but many sincere souls still resorted to him. 

One phrase from an incident at Cesarea-Philippi 
lights up for us, as by a spark struck from a common 
experience, the state of mind of the devout of Israel, 
“Lord, I believe, Help thou mine unbelief.” It was 
the cry that had burst with tears from the father of 
the dumb demoniac whom the disciple could not 
heal. Coming down from the mount of transfigura- 
tion, Jesus had found a crowd gathered about the 
remnant of his disciples, and in their midst the man 
begging relief for his son. It was not until the Mas- 
ter accosted him with the customary formula, 
**Believest thou that I canst do this thing?” that the 
deep-seated doubt came to the surface in that cry. 


112 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


So Israel, unhealed by all its prophets, voiced its 
doubt and its desire. Upon this cry the common 
faith tossed to and fro, rallied, broke, and scattered, 
came to fulfilment at last in martyrdom long after 
he had passed. At times his human nature shook 
its shadow over the surface of his mood. He was 
impatient with the incompetence of his disciples. 
... O faithless generation, how long shall I suffer 
you!” He pronounced woe on Chorazin and Beth- 
saida. At times a wistful humanness broke through. 
“Can it be that a prophet shall perish from Jeru- 
salem!’ 

Not that there wanted occasions to try the pa- 
tience of the teacher. No sooner had the disciples 
been given leave to think of Jesus as the Messiah 
than they were found, on the way back from Cesarea- 
Philippi, in fact, disputing who should be greatest. 
A man discovered casting out devils in the name of 
Jesus was forbid by them because he was not of 
their following. To both of these, especially to the 
latter—first instance of the independent spread of 
his teachings during his life—Jesus made answer 
and illustration so unequivocal that it is a mystery 
how his name people have so long avoided both. 
**For whosoever shall give a cup of cold water in my 
name hath done it unto me...” he said, touching 
the question of unauthorized healing, and left them 
in no doubt as to the quality of their offense against 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 113 


“one of these lesser ones who believe in me.” But 
the millstone hangs still about the neck of the 
church, because of what it has done to those who take 
the name of Jesus in some fashion other than their 
own. 

Incidents such as these, showing how far his 
chosen disciples were from comprehending him, con- 
tributed to the sense of disappointment voiced in 
his invective against the cities of Galilee. .. . “For 
if the mighty works which have been done in thee 
had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have 
repented in sackcloth and ashes.” It had its part 
in the urge which drove him, knowing what awaited 
him there, to set his face steadily toward Jerusalem. 

This would have been two or three months before 
Passover, nearer if we accept the incident of the 
temple tax which was collected in Capernaum. The 
rains would have been well on, the winter wheat was 
up, and as many as were able making ready for the 
yearly pilgrimage. Altogether an excellent time to 
waken men to the immanence of the kingdom. 

Concerning the manner of this journey, there is 
little said but much indicated. It was traveled with 
a considerable company, augmenting as they went, 
Jesus and the twelve with some members of their 
families, and certain women who ministered to them, 
Mary of Magdala, out of whom were cast seven 
devils, and some others. They went afoot, with 


114 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


perhaps a donkey or two for the slender luggage; 
and every mile they trod was historic holy ground. 
It was the custom, on approaching a village where 
Jesus would teach, for two or three of the disciples 
to go ahead and make such provision as they could 
for the entertainment of the Master, announcing 
him, and no doubt appointing a place where he could 
be heard. But there must have been many occa- 
sions between villages or in those which proved in- 
hospitable, when they camped happily in the fields 
or in the courtyard of the wayside khans. It ap- 
pears that a first attempt was made to reach Jeru- 
salem by the ancient Egyptian road which ran 
through Samaria, past Sychar and the vale of 
Shechem, but the Samaritans would not receive 
them. At the first village where the inhabitants 
proved unfriendly, the sons of Zebedee would have 
called down fire upon them after the manner of 
Elijah, so hardly had they learned the lesson that 
the Son of Man was come to save and not to destroy. 
The Samaritans, always an easy, idol-loving people, 
closer to Rome under the hand of the Procurator 
Pontius Pilate, and furthest from the national dream, 
pushed their indifference to the prophet to the pro- 
hibitive point, for we hear no more of Jesus having 
set foot in the country of Shechem. They returned, 
instead, and approached Jerusalem from the south- 
east by way of the other side of Jordan. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 115 


It was in the bitterness of this rejection, no doubt, 
that he said to one who would have followed him, 
“Foxes have holes . . . but the son of man hath not 
where to lay his head.” And to another who made 
excuse that he must first bury his father, “Let the 
dead bury their dead,” since dead he found them in 
the spirit. So they passed to the parts of Syria be- 
yond the Bridge from which, when the Bridge was 
broken under the heel of the Roman legionaries, the 
tide of Islam rolled in upon them. 

This is a high, level country with a wind always 
in the wheat and great oaks rustling along the ridges. 
In Gilead there is balm, fields of fragrant herbs, 
orchards of pomegranate and apricot. Moab is a 
land of pastures; the roadways are beaten to dust 
by the flocks; toward Amman herds of camels feed- 
ing. A band of pilgrims passing from city to city 
of the Greek league of the Decapolis would seldom 
be far from the sound of the shepherds’ pipes and 
the heavy bells of the cattle as they break down the 
wadis to the drinking-places. This was the land of 
Gad and Reuben, and, though strong in Greek in- 
fluence, was still predominantly Hebrew. Scarcely 
had the apostolic band set foot in it when they were 
met by Pharisees with the customary Levitical 
quibble. 

This time it was an inquiry as to whether it was 
lawful for a man to put away his wife for every rea- 


116 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


son. In Jewry the power of divorce lay in the hands 
of the husband, requiring scarcely more than the 
mere form of saying so to make it lawful. It is pos- 
sible that the party of the Pharisees were honestly 
opposed to the abuses which had sprung up under 
Roman laxness, but it is also probable that they were 
not unwilling to set Jesus at odds with Herod, who, 
in the thick of his troubles between Herodias and 
the father of his wife, was sensitive on the subject 
of divorce. If he had beheaded John for his stric- 
tures, what might he not be provoked to undertake 
against the man from Nazareth? Jesus, however, 
with his customary tact, avoided the personal issue 
and maintained the stand he had earlier taken of 
inviolable marriage, basing it not upon any Levitical 
revelation, but as is inevitable, upon the natural 
mating habits of humankind “as it was in the 
beginning.”’ Here, too, is the first recognition of 
human expedient; “because of the hardness of your 
hearts,” divorce was allowed by Moses. Which did 
not, however, render less obligatory the single, life- 
long relation, for though polygamy was still to be 
found, it appears nowhere to have crossed his horizon 
nor to have entered into the problem of early 
Christianity. In this connection one may speak 
of the sole other incident which illuminated for us, 
in the light of the teachings of Jesus, the vexed re- 
lations of sex. This is an incident which finds its 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 117 


way into no canonical writing until the early part 
of the second century, when it was inserted in the 
document attributed to John, where, in spite of 
some exegetical difficulties, it makes good its claim 
to consideration. It is placed in the vicinity of 
Jerusalem, and by tradition wholly unsupported, but 
of high antiquity, connected with the person of Mary 
of Magdala. By those of the priestly party, who 
hoped to catch him tripping, there was brought to 
him a woman taken in adultery. But Jesus, making 
as though he heard them not, stooping, wrote with 
his finger upon the ground, and when they con- 
tinued asking what should be done to her, lifted him- 
self at last, inquiring of them the penalty. Where- 
upon her accusers insisted that it was lawful she 
should be stoned. Said Jesus, “Let him that is 
without sin among you first cast a stone.” In this 
fashion he went the first mile which they compelled 
him. But when at the end of the second he found 
himself alone with the woman, he left off writing to 
say, “Hath no man condemned thee?” 

Said she, ““No man, Lord.” 

Then said Jesus: ‘Neither do I condemn thee. 
Go, sin no more.” 

Words and acts, they are both of a piece with all 
that we know of Jesus; for was he not among the 
prophets and given to symbolic acts charged with 
more than mere words conveyed? Writing in the 


118 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


dust was it not to say—for we do not know if he 
had really learned to write at all—even so is this 
sin of which you accuse her, written in the body, 
which, being dust, perishes? Whether or not the 
incident occurred as stated, it goes with the answer 
to the Pharisees to show, that though Jesus con- 
stituted chastity a matter of mind as well as body, 
he made no more of lapses from it than of other sins, 
and forgave them as readily. He put the desire of 
the flesh on exactly the same moral footing as the 
greed of wealth and the lust of pride, neither con- 
demning it more severely, as the church has done, 
nor more easily excusing, as is the way of the world. 

It is doubtful, however, if the twelve grasped any- 
thing of the breadth of his comment on the existing 
law, allowed by Moses because of “‘the hardness of 
their hearts,’ for we find them moving in an orbit 
as narrow almost as that of his detractors, forbid- 
ding the children which were brought to him to 
be blessed, and still unlessoned when he, taking a 
little child in his arms and setting him in the midst 
of them, declared that of such were the kingdom 
of heaven. In a very little while, here are the sons 
of Zebedee, at the first opportunity asking for the 
chief seats in heaven. 

This takes us back a little to one of the earlier 
incidents of the Perean pilgrimage, to the young man 
who had kept all the law and the commandments 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 119 


from his youth up, and was still concerned as to how 
he might inherit eternal life. Said the teacher: 
“One thing thou lackest .. . sell all thou hast... 
take up thy cross and follow me.” But to the dis- 
ciples, after the young man had gone away grieving 
(for he had great possessions), Jesus said, ““How 
hardly shall a rich man enter into the kingdom.”’ 

“And,” says Mark, “the disciples were aston- 
ished at his words.” 

This is more important even than the saying. 
They were astonished. For eight or nine months 
they had been with him, preaching preparation for 
the kingdom, and this was the first they had heard 
of personal wealth as a bar to entry; a serious over- 
sight on the part of the Master, if we are to read 
this comment on the particular case as constituting 
an essential doctrine. All through the Galilean 
ministry not a word has been heard of it, though 
Luke expressly tells us that there were women of 
substance in his train. Later, in Jerusalem, we find 
him accepting the use of a room for the Passover, 
and a garden without the walls, from those of his fol- 
lowers whose fortunes permitted of such lendings. 
It appears, however, not only from circumstances 
such as these, but from what immediately follows, 
that it was not the possession of riches which Jesus 
discredited, but the attachment to them; for he 
goes on to put in the same category, brethren and 


120 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


sisters, parent or wife or children. Just as curt had 
been his rejection of one who would have been his 
disciple, but wished first to bury his father. The 
stress upon wealth, as against other distractions to 
the spirit, is ours, not Jesus’. 

Too much has been made of the incident of the 
rich young man and of a later parable of Lazarus 
and Dives, which illustrated a popular notion, 
pagan as well as Hebrew, that somehow in its turn- 
ing the wheel of life must bring to every soul the 
full round of experience—to the poor riches, and to 
the rich poverty, and to those that mourned rejoic- 
ing. Something of this kind must have been in the 
mind of the disciples, for though this seems to have 
been the first time that Jesus’ doctrine of self- 
abnegation came clear to them, it set them off im- 
mediately in the direction of the logical compensa- 
tion. Something of tenderness for the Master’s 
disappointment in the rich young man—for Jesus, 
beholding him, had loved him—must have been in 
Peter’s, “‘Lo, we have left all and followed thee.” 
But nothing could have illustrated so completely the 
gap which in spite of all this intimate fellowship, lay 
between Jesus and his disciples, as the way in which 
James and John turned the promise of spiritual re- 
ward with which Jesus met the profferred consola- 
tion, into a hope of material advancement. It was 
not long before they found a naive expression for it. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 121 


It seems that while they were on the way to 
Jerusalem the reserve and caution which had char- 
acterized the movement of the Master for the past 
few months were suddenly laid aside. Jesus re- 
sumed the leadership, walked openly at the head of 
his disciples, filled with power. In answer to their 
fear and amazement he must have tried again to 
prepare them for what was to happen shortly at 
Jerusalem, and again the revelation was either too 
symbolic to be clear or too clear to be believable. 
All that they seem to gather from it was that the 
expected apocalypse was at hand, and, full of un- 
shakable confidence in the result, James and John 
_ preferred their request. It was very simply that 
they might sit the one on the right hand, the other 
on the left, of him in glory. 

Said the Master: “Ye know not what ye ask. 
Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of and be 
baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” 
They thought they could, knowing nothing of what 
the words signified, thinking of them, no doubt, as 
purely material, and that death and humiliation 
could in no wise be endured by one who healed lepers 
and raised the dying by the hand. But it was not 
their obtuseness which touched Jesus so nearly, nor 
the jealousy of the other ten at their asking, as the 
evidence of self-seeking, the utter failure of his dis- 
ciples to grasp the teaching which the last phases 


122 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


of his life were so completely to exemplify—the need 
and the power of service. “‘For whoso seeketh his 
life shall lose it and he that loseth shall find... 
and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be 
the servant of all . . . for the son of man came not 
to be ministered unto but to minister.” 

§ 

Of the recorded part of this Perean pilgrimage 
there is very little more except what is common to 
all his ministry. Of healings there was but one—a 
blind man by the roadside as they came into Jericho; 
of parables the same sort, and perhaps the same 
that belonged to the preaching in Galilee. They 
were all of the kingdom and how it should be consti- 
tuted, and of the Fatherliness of God. The kingdom 
of heaven was a net which was let down into the sea; 
it was a field of sown wheat among which the enemy 
scattered tares; 1t was the leaven hid in three meas- 
ures of meal. It was anything that might imply 
separation of what is good from what is evil, the 
deliberate choice of the soul. The kingdom was 
something which, when you had found it, was worth 
all that you had to pay, into possession of which you 
might not enter without the full price. It was a 
little child whom he had set in their midst and said 
“such is the kingdom of heaven.” It was in being 
all that the child was, trusting, doing no evil, think- 
ing none, all-loving, glad. The kingdom of heaven 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 123 





proceeded from the heart outward and was not 
affected by material observances. It was the faith 
of the mustard-seed, which, by merely accepting the 
condition of being a seed and growing, became as a 
tree in the branches of which lodged the birds of 
the air. “And behold, the kingdom of God is 
within you.” 

Of God there was less to say because simpler. 
He was a father pitying his children, rejoicing more 
over one sinner which repented than over ninety- 
and-nine which went not astray. He was the just 
judge and the wise master; the friend of the soul 
of man. He heard prayer and answered it, and 
men ought always to pray and to faint not. 

As to what Jesus said of himself there is less than 
this generation realizes. Nursed in an interpreta- 
tion of Christianity which made Jesus the chief 
part of his own teaching, we have much to forget 
before we can see how apart he held himself from 
his doctrine. That day in Nazareth, when among 
his own kin he stood up in the synagogue and read 
from the book of Isaiah, was his first and only public 
attempt to represent himself as the fulfilment of 
prophecy. He read: 

The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he an- 
ointed me to preach good tidings to the poor . . . to 
proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. But there 
is no evidence that when he began to say, “This 


124 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


day is the scripture fulfilled in your ears,” that he 
thought of himself as anything more than the 
scripture described—an appointed preacher, another 
voice in the wilderness. ‘To John, who sent asking, 
he offered not himself, but his works. Once in the 
press at Capernaum a woman cried out, “‘ Blessed 
be the womb that bore thee and the breasts that 
gave thee suck.” And he answered her, rebukingly, 
“Rather blessed be they that hear the word of God 
and keep it.” And on the mountain, “‘Why call 
ye me Lord, Lord, and do not the things that I 
say?” 

It was in some such frame as this that he passed 
through Perea for the last time and came again to 
the borders of Judea. 


§ 


Of the unwritten part of this journey it is pos- 
sible to think that much can be traced in the life 
of the Christian community during the next half- 
score of years. How many were with him on the 
whole journey and how many joined him in the Rift 
of Jordan can only be conjectured, but he ar- 
rived in Jerusalem with a sufficient company of his 
Galilean friends to give to their intercourse a cer- 
tain definite stamp. Here was the beginning of 
that strong sense of community interest, the shared 
bread, the daily worship, grace before meat,—habits 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 125 


of living which characterized the first proselyting 
period of the new faith; the public testimony, the 
benediction, the hymn-singing. Above all, the gra- 
cious kindliness, the cheer, the contained and quiet 
joy which was shed as a savor from early Christian 
behavior. Such as they were he must have been— 
little vessels all of them overfilled at his fountain. 
(By the watercourses of Reuben, great were the resolves 
of heart!) 

Here, too, must have been established that ac- 
ceptance of women in the Father, so unequivocal 
that all Paul’s prejudice could not afterward con- 
trovert it; Jesus admitted them to argument, he 
permitted them to sit in privileged places. It does 
not appear that he anywhere expressed himself as 
opposed to any of the current notions of sex in- 
feriority; rather to conduct himself as if he had not 
known such distinctions to exist. He had not one 
manner for the virtuous housewife and another for 
the woman of the town. He yielded to the argu- 
ment of the Syrophcenician woman, and in a story 
told by John, which seems to be compounded of a 
half-remembered parable and some items of actual 
incident, he is shown revealing himself quite simply 
to a woman at a wayside well, a woman of the de- 
spised Samaritan sect, thought to be so far outside 
the grace of God as to be disbarred from the temple, 
but not beyond the reach of his gospel. 


126 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


Not wholly authenticated, but true enough to the 
situation to have been true in fact, is an incident 
related in the book of Apostolic Ordinances. ‘There 
had arisen, it appears, in the primitive church, the 
question of a separate ministry for women, for among 
the Jews women had never been admitted to the 
highest intimacies of religion. John was strongly 
for it, urging that there had been no women present 
at the last supper, whereat Mary was seen to smile, 
But when Martha called their attention to it she 
denied that she had laughed, “For,” said she, “he 
told us beforehand when he taught, that the weak 
should be saved through the strong.”’ Whether or 
not the incident occurred as related, the freedom of 
Jesus from every form of social prejudice was evi- 
dent enough to pull the early church about from its 
Oriental bias toward the subordination of women, 
and face it definitely to the larger liberty of the 
West. Themselves in bondage to the habit of their 
upbringing, the women of his following probably took 
less than he would have allowed them; it is not 
recorded that he ever refused any one of them what 
she asked. He included them, good and bad, in that 
democracy of the spirit which established a minimum 
value for every soul of both sexes and all classes. 

§ 

At the time the little company came down out 

of the high, veiled Jand of Moab, all Jewry was 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 197 


afoot and astir in this business of the Passover. In 
the month Adar the temple tax was collected, roads 
were mended, sepulchers whitened lest any pilgrim 
suffer defilement. From every village a devoted 
band set forth; the poor on their own feet, the rich 
in litters; Jews of the dispersion; Alexandrine bank- 
ers riding on camels. All the stony lanes were 
choked with bleating lambs for the Paschal rite, 
heifers for sacrifice, vendors of doves moving under 
great pyramids of cages. Caravans went up—goods 
of Damascus, Egyptian dates, silks of Arabia. 
Every morning found hordes of market gardeners 
with their donkeys waiting for the opening of the 
gates. Great loads of palm branches, of green 
boughs cut from the jungle along Jordan, went in 
for the building of booths. In their gardens outside 
the city the rich set up pavilions—for there were 
no gardens within the holy city, lest the blown dust of 
manure defile the temple—and relived from Sab- 
bath to Sabbath the years their fathers spent in the 
Wilderness. 

Herod went up, needing greatly the public con- 
sent to his war with Aretas, and the countenance 
of the Roman authorities; Pontius Pilate, from his 
official seat at Czesarea-by-the-sea, new Roman 
officials keen for this strange new festival, legion- 
aries for the policing of the city. A million and a 
half—in favored years two million—pilgrims gathered 


128 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


in Jerusalem. It was the time of the year’s resur- 
cection; the orchards budded, the tufted grass was 
greening, cyclamen came up in the clefts of the rock 
with round, shining leaves like shields of silver. 
Along the hard, white ways between the thorny 
hedges there was sound of psalm-singing. 

Into all this pageantry of historical and religious 
observance Jesus came with his company, knowing 
the way he was to walk and able to walk init. At 
the ford of Jordan, probably the same at which he 
was baptized, he was met by warning advices. 
“Depart hence. Herod will kill thee.” To which 
he made answer, “‘Go tell that fox that to-day and 
to-morrow I cast out devils and do cures, and the 
third day I am perfected.” A cryptic saying to his 
disciples, but if we read “finished” for perfected, 
clearly indicating that he knew his work so near an 
end that it was now immaterial what Herod should 
do to him. So with full courage he crossed over 
Jordan and stopped at Jericho, the fragrant. It sits 
in the midst of orchards close under the bluffs of 
Judea, having the glittering surface of the Dead 
Sea always on the south and the brown river flow- 
ing past. When the wind is right, blown gusts of 
the temple music come faintly down from Jerusalem, 
fifteen miles away. Here he spent the night and 
perhaps a Sabbath. 

Two incidents, slight in themselves, illuminate 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 129 


the public mind. He was addressed by a blind man 
as Son of David, and Zaccheus, the publican, climbed 
a tree that he might have a good look at the new 
prophet in the midst of the crowd that came out to 
meet him. For the movements of Jesus were noted; 
and to others than his immediate circle had spread 
the hope in him as the Messiah. 

The road from Jericho to Jerusalem leads up a 
red gorge and its winding ridges, a hot, heavy way, 
blind, waterless. It figures chiefly as the scene of 
a parable which Jesus laid there, in which the falling 
among thieves was the likeliest, and the rescue by 
the good Samaritan the loveliest, that might have 
happened there. By this time there must have 
been a considerable company in the train of the 
man from Nazareth, traveling in a state of hardly 
suppressed excitement, for, says Luke, “They 
thought that the kingdom of God should immedi- 
ately appear.” They came singing, as befitted pil- 
grims, a song of going up, “songs of degrees,” dating 
from the return from captivity. 

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, 


they sang, seeing the hill of Zion in the mind’s eye 
long before they came in sight of it, and also 

I was glad when they said unto me 

Let us go into the house of the Lord! 


Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jeru- 
salem! 


130 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


for it was a great commemorative occasion, and there 
were many in that company who had not yet seen 
that most moving sight to any Jew, the holy city. 

They would have been all the morning climbing 
up out of the sweltering Rift to the cool ridges. 
At Bethpage, where the road to Bethany turns off 
from the main highway, they took their nooning. 
Just around the shoulder of Olivet they would have 
had the first glimpse of Jerusalem. It burst upon 
them, transfigured in the slant afternoon light, a 
city walled up to heaven from the gulis of Hinnom 
and Kidron. First they saw the citadel, then the 
white towers of Antonia, the gilded temple roofs, and 
the long arcade of Solomon’s porch wreathed for 
the festival . . . whither the tribes go up, the tribes of 
the Lord unto the testumony of Israel, to gwe thanks 
unto the name of the Lord. . . . And, looking on it, 
Jesus wept. 

We can only conclude that what followed was 
born of the inspiration of the moment; it was part 
of that impassioned cry, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 
how often would I have gathered thy children to- 
gether!’ which burst from him with all the warm 
and patriotic sentiment the sight of it stirred up, 
and with the knowledge deep in his own mind of 
what it was still to do to a prophet of Nazareth. 

Perhaps the passage from Zacharia had just flashed 
upon his mind, “Thy king shall come to thee, lowly and 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 131 


riding wpon an ass.... Jerusalem that dreamed 
of a Messiah sitting in the heavens, clothed in au- 
thority; Jerusalem that stoned the prophets should 
have a parable in the true prophetic manner, after 
the fashion of Isaiah, who walked three years bare- 
foot without his upper garment, and of Zedekiah, 
who bound horns upon his forehead with which to 
push against the Syrians. Sending back to the vil- 
lage which they had just passed to borrow an ass 
which he had seen tied there—for there were beasts 
everywhere to be hired for the sight-seeing—Jesus 
came riding on it into the chief city of the Jews, a 
man of the masses, travel-stained, with long hair 
like a woman’s. 

So he fulfilled, for those who strained after these 
things, the strained letter of the prophecy. Viewed 
in any other light than that subtle spiritual irony 
of which he was master, the incident takes on a poor 
touch of human futility, and neither vanity nor 
futility had any place in him. To the simple Gali- 
leans, his followers, it appealed as an assumption of 
new dignities. They spread their garments before 
him, raising a loud Hosanna. From the temple 
porch across Kidron came an answering shout. It 
was caught up by the crowd in the street, and many 
curious and devout, who had listened to him in 
Galilee and Perea, came pouring out of the eastern 
gate, waving palms and welcoming: 


132 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord! 
Oh, give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good! 


chanted the pilgrim band, and from the crowd 
streaming from the city gates came the antiphonal 
response: 


For his mercy endureth for ever! 


for so it was customary to receive pilgrims at the 
feast of the Passover. Throughout the capital it 
became known that the new prophet from Nazareth 
had arrived with his following. 

Popular excitement must have died down very 
soon after the procession entered by the Eastern 
Gate. It tailed out in the narrow streets and lost 
itself in the vast throngs of the indifferent and merely 
curious. Nothing whatever happened. The dimin- 
ishing band of enthusiasts made their way toward 
the temple, packed with the Jews of all Nations. 
It would have been about the hour of the evening 
sacrifice, the money-changers would have folded their 
tables, the vendors of doves had left for the day, 
the crowd was hushed and worshipful. Jesus and 
his handful of Galileans looked about on all the 
solemn wonders, and at evening retired to the vil- 
lage of Bethany. 


The Lord is my strength and song 
And he is become my salvation. 

The vorce of rejoicing and salvation 
Is in the tabernacles of the righteous. 


The right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly. 


The right hand of the Lord 7s exalted, 
The right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly, 


T shall not die but ive, 
And declare the works of the Lord. 
The Lord hath chastened me sore 
But he hath not given me over unto death. 
Ofen to me the gates of righteousness, 
I will go into them, I will give thanks unto the 


Lord. 


I wil] give thanks unto thee, for thou hast answered 
me, 
And art become my salvation. 
The stone which the builders rejected 
Is become the head of the corner. 


This is the Lord’s doing; 
I¢ 7s marvelous in our eyes. 
This 7s the day the Lord hath made; 
We will rejoice and be glad in it. 
Save now, we beseech thee, O Lord; 
O Lord, we beseech thee, send now prosperity. 


[Part of the Hallel sung at the end of the Paschal supper.] 


f Bs a 


t % 4 i, ite) HY he tf i "3 . 


mite ayy | Be 


pul i Wie 





Vil 


ONSIDER the lair of the lion of Judah, how 

it is established on the prongs of the great 
central plateau, walled up to heaven. On Zion is 
the citadel, Moriah is pieced out by solid piers of 
masonry to make room for the temple. Between 
them the tyropeon, the place of the merchants, leads 
down to Hinnom; round the eastern base sweeps 
the Valley of Jehoshaphat, through which flows Kid- 
ron. Gardens lie thick in the trough of Jehoshaphat 
and Hinnom, but the ravine at the back of the city 
is called Gehenna, for rubbish is thrown there and 
a fire for ever consumes the city’s slough and waste. 
Across Kidron rises the Mount of Olives, from which 
the land falls eastward by terraces to the valley of 
the shadow, which is Jordan. Always Jerusalem 
looks into the gulf, but never quite to the bottom 
of it, and east away the blue hills of Moab float upon 
the horizon and affect the imagination like the sea. 
Northward stretches the hill country of Judea, full 
of contour and color. Reasons like these as much 
as history, have to do with the pride of Jerusalem 


and its fierce resentment of overlordship. Herod 
135 


136 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


the Great being in part a Jew, held it with a strong, 
cruel hand; Archelaus could not hold it at all; and 
Pontius Pilate, at this time Procurator, lost it. 

But before Rome took her, the worst had already 
happened to Jerusalem. She had fallen into the 
hands of the hierarchy. Political imposition is a 
yoke upon men’s necks, but the rule of priests is a 
fetter to the understanding. When Pilate ordered 
the Roman standards into the city, standards bear- 
ing the image of the Emperor and hence an abomi- 
nation, the Sanhedrin opposed him and won; when 
he set up votive shields in Herod’s palace the four 
sons of Herod headed the protest to Rome; when he 
spent the temple treasure on an aqueduct he had the 
whole priestly party against him; but when a man 
came freely speaking his opinion of priests and the 
conduct of the temple, they made of the Procurator 
the instrument of his destruction. Whether they 
fought Pilate or used him, the mainspring of action 
was always the preservation of their Levitical au- 
thority. 

Probably they thought they were right—it is one 
of the prime necessities of men in large numbers 
that they should think so of themselves—but one 
thing they knew, and that was that it was profitable. 
Here we touch on one other factor of the Hebrew 
religion which determined the development of Chris- 
tianity as the soil on which it is reared determines 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 137 


the harvest. We have seen how Jesus rooted him- 
self in the reality of moral principle; all that follows 
goes to show how the survival of his teaching was 
shaped by the profound Hebrew conviction of the 
efficacy of sacrifice. The pagan gave to his gods 
when there was need or when he felt happy, but 
Israel gave also because there was virtue in giving. 
He gave whether God saved or destroyed him; he 
gave more or less as God prospered bhim—the one 
essential was that he should keep on giving. Israel 
took up the principle of sacrifice, which is an indeter- 
minate element of all religion, and made it over 
with the aid of the business instinct. 

What had been revealed to Judah as the soul’s 
supremest need had become a system. It was no 
longer sacrifice, but tribute. As a people, Jews had 
spread over the known world, but the heart of Jewry 
still beat at Jerusalem; it was the one place where 
offering was acceptable to the Lord. Wherever a 
faithful Jew was found, from him to the temple 
trickled a thin stream of gold. It came from Rome 
and Egypt and Babylonia; it came even from a 
prophet in Galilee and his twelve disciples. That 
Jesus very clearly distinguished between tribute 
and sacrifice is evident from the remark credited to 
him on the payment of the temple tax. Tribute was 
a thing which might be exacted of strangers, but 
never of the Children; between them and the Father 


138 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


no such necessity existed. Nevertheless, he released 
one of his disciples to go a-fishing to raise the money, 
that no offense might be given. He conformed to 
the custom rather than, by raising an issue, delay a 
greater matter; but his attitude toward the abuses 
growing out of the system brooked no compromise. 

The abuses were precisely those which a few cen- 
turies later sprang up among his name people; for 
Israel had hit upon the one plan by which a hierarchy 
may be consistently maintained, and Christianity, 
blindly led by the blind, fell into the same ditch. 
Whether it is called tribute or modernly disguised as 
“systematic giving,’ it is only where sacrifice ceases 
to be the soul’s highest voluntary function and be- 
comes a habit, that the priesthood attains to tem- 
poral power. The constant flow of tribute into 
Jerusalem had begotten a ring of grafters as invin- 
eible and corrupt as ever controlled a modern mu- 
nicipality. ‘There were officials for collecting tribute 
and for transmitting 1t, merchants of exchange who 
sat in the temple porch to exchange coin of all 
countries for the temple half-shekel, paying heavily 
for the privilege. There were inspectors of beasts 
bought for sacrifice, who had to be compounded; 
vendors of temple wares—incense, phylacteries, 
reliquaries, such things as are sold immemorially 
about temples. Altogether the temple rake-off 
amounted to about forty thousand dollars yearly. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 139 


All this was organized and in a measure controlled 
by one Annas, ex-high priest, with his five sons, 
priests all, and Caiphas, his son-in-law, high priest 
for the current occasion. 

How much of this was known to Jesus and his 
disciples in Galilee is a matter of conjecture. Be- 
tween affairs at the capital and the mass of the 
people stood the sect of the Sadducees, adroit, worldly, 
deriving authority solely from the books of Moses, 
discrediting the prophets; they intrigued alike with 
Rome and the priesthood, feathering their own 
nests. Not unknown to Jesus, they drew less of 
his condemnation than the Pharisees by making 
fewer pretensions. It is probable, however, that the 
Galileans had heard a rumor of these things as vil- 
lagers hear them, things which they felt themselves 
knowing to believe, or virtuous in denying. That 
nothing was farther from their thoughts on the sec- 
ond morning, when they walked in from Bethany, 
can be easily gathered from what followed. 

Jesus had spent the night at the house around 
which lingers the tradition of Martha, careful about 
many things, and Mary, who chose the better part 
in choosing to hear of the Kingdom. Bethany lies 
on the Jordan side of Olivet, hid from the city; 
Bethpage is at the junction on the Bethany road 
with the great public highway; from here is one con- 
tinuous suburb of hamlet and garden to the foot of 


140 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


the rock from which the city soars above the abyss. 
It is from this point that the temple first engaged 
the eye, shining with the morning. From pillared 
court within court it rose, dazzling, roofed with gold. 
The smoke of the morning sacrifice went up; they 
heard the choir chanting. But within, beyond the 
court of the Gentiles, within the court of the Men 
of Israel, which rose tier by tier from the court of 
the Women, beyond the holy place where stood the 
great altar, the Holy of Holies was empty, quite 
empty. 

This would have been Monday by the most re- 
lable chronology. If they arrived at the temple in 
the hour after the morning sacrifice before the 
sight-seeing crowd had well gathered, they would 
have seen the temple traffic at its worst and most 
sacrilegious. In the court of the Gentiles, a wide, 
tessellated space inclosed with a noble Corinthian 
colonnade, the noise of the rabble, the bleating of 
sheep brought for sacrifice, must have struck offen- 
sively across the solemn associations awakened in 
the mind of every devout Jew on first entering the 
sacred precinct. Across the open court rose the 
sanctuary from its terrace, doors and lintels overlaid 
with gold and silver. By the Gate Beautiful they 
went up into the court of the Women, a handsome 
colonnaded space into which fifteen thousand wor- 
shipers could be crowded. Here between the columns 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 141 


they found the table of the money-changers, little 
shops, set up along the wall spaces. One can under- 
stand how they would have hung together, the 
Galileans in their brown-and-white burnooses around 
the tall figure of their prophet, ignored by hurrying 
priests, elbowed by insolent temple attendants, 
while the sense of what they saw sank into them. 
From the language used by Jesus, when at last he 
could no longer keep silent, it must have been some 
extortion, some provincial mulcted of his due ex- 
change, some widow overcharged for a pair of doves, 
that fanned his wrath into action. 

The disturbance, whatever it was, could hardly 
have extended beyond the sanctuary; the money- 
changers would not have risked a general riot. At 
the overturning of the first table they would have 
gathered up their moneys, the vendors of small wares 
fled, squealing. After all, the man might be a 
prophet, and the sympathy of the bystanders would 
have certainly been on his side. 

It is reported that Jesus drove out the money- 
changers with a whip, and from that time, when he 
was in the temple, would permit none of his follow- 
ing to carry into the temple the implement and sign 
of his trade, as was the common practice, upon his 
person. 

There is a ribald song still extant about the sons 
of Annas, who had a bazar within the sanctuary, 


142 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


which shows how Jerusalem went with its tongue in 
its cheek in respect to the temple management. A 
more interesting commentary still, is the fact that 
not a word of all this leaked through to the Roman 
authorities. Here was the most influential group of 
Jerusalemites, manhandled and affronted in their 
own temple, and nothing whatever is heard of the 
police, no complaint for assault is lodged. It is a 
commentary on the utter indefensibility of the 
temple traffic, and the only tribute paid by or- 
ganized Jewry to the prophetic character of Jesus. 
In that brief period of hesitation was let slip the 
occasion to deal with him as an ordinary disturber 
of public worship. In spite of themselves they 
were forced to deal with him as a public character. 

Deal with him they must, and that speedily. 
For not only had he driven out the traffic, but he 
continued to hang about the temple, both that day 
and the next, supported by his twelve stalwart 
Galileans, preaching to the people and enforcing by 
the moral weight of his presence the embargo on 
everything not consistent with the traditions of the 
sanctuary. And this while there were perhaps two 
or three hundred thousand pilgrims in the city 
waiting to be fleeced. Plainly the man was a 
nuisance and must be disposed of. They went 
about it in a manner truly Hebraic. 

The first movement was to send a delegation to 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 143 


inquire by what authority he did these things, know- 
ing that he had no rabbinical certificates, and think- 
ing to discredit him with the public, for Hebraism 
is before all else a religion of authority. Jesus coun- 
tered with another question. 

“The baptism of John, was it from heaven or of 
men?” 

He had them there, for if they said “Of heaven,”’ 
why, then, had they not believed it? And they dared 
not say “‘of men,” lest the multitude who counted 
John a prophet, be moved against them. So, neatly 
caught between the clefts of their own question, 
they withdrew from the first encounter, and in the 
mean time Jesus had the ear of the people. He 
preached there in the temple, so full of his message 
that he snatched it from the very stones which in 
wonder they showed him—for the temple had been 
forty years in building, and was judged one of the 
wonders of the world. He drew from the widow 
casting her mite into the box of the treasury; he 
lifted up his eyes from Solomon’s porch and saw 
the tombs of the prophets whitened newly for the 
season of the pilgrimage, and found in them the fig- 
ure of hypocrisy, going smug without and inwardly 
full of corruption and dead men’s bones. 

On the very day of the cleansing of the temple, 
while the rumor of it still ran about the pillars of 
Solomon’s porch, he spoke a parable in which he 


144 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


quite explicitly stated that publicans and harlots 
should go into the kingdom before the chief priests 
and their following. He scored the Pharisees 
afresh, “‘devourers of widows’ houses, making long 
prayers for a pretense,” seeing in their pious hum- 
bug the greatest menace to his teaching. Moving 
in imminent peril of his life, he moved as freely as 
among his Galilean hills, preaching in the temple 
daily and on the Mount of Olives walking between 
the orchards, discoursing of the kingdom. It was 
as if he understood that he was now at the end of 
his ministry, and was concerned merely to draw out 
and define again its salient teaching. In and out of 
a dozen brilliant parables flashed the doctrine of 
the kingdom as a thing to be done, a task set and 
achieved, a charge to keep. Men believed, and, be- 
lieving, acted, and in doing were saved ... “for in- 
asmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, 
ye have done it unto me.” 

That he missed no point of the situation is evident 
from his appeal to the preaching of John, knowing 
the Baptist to have had a firmer hold than himself 
on the popular imagination, and also from the spirit 
with which he evaded the next trap which they set 
for him. 

Unable, on the one hand, to discredit him with 
the populace, they sought, on the other, to set him 
at odds with Pilate. The approach. was well cal- 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 145 


culated on the basis of his being a Galilean, one of 
that tribe among whom had developed the most 
invincible opposition to the Roman authority. 
Now, as one regarding not the person of man, would 
he or would he not advise them to give tribute to 
Cesar? But the answer, “Render unto Cesar the 
things that are Ceesar’s and to God the things that 
are God’s,” left them exactly where they were be- 
fore, if, in fact, it did not leave them a trifle more dis- 
comfited, for he had glanced here at the custom of 
paying divine honors to emperors, to which they 
had been a shade too complaisant. Then came the 
Sadducees mocking, with a question trumped up 
about a resurrection from the dead—a possibility 
in which they did not in the least believe—and were 
answered out of their own Pentateuch in the words 
of their only prophet, Moses. In this fashion Jesus 
fenced for time, that he might drive home his mes- 
sage. 

But the Pharisees, when they heard how he had 
reduced the Sadducees to silence, plumed themselves 
and came asking, “Which is the great command- 
ment?’ Only they themselves knew what advan- 
tage they hoped for in the answer to such a question; 
what came neither they nor the world has ever 
been able wholly to handle. Said Jesus: 

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
heart and with all thy mind and with all thy strength, 


146 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


and thy neighbor as thyself. On these two hang all 
the law and the prophets.”’ 

Then, suddenly wearied of question which had no 
honest query of the heart behind it, he turned on 
them with an exegetical problem so exactly in their 
own manner and so impossible to answer that it 
put an end once for all to that form of inquisition. 
Balked in wit, the priestly party turned to the one 
instrument which they understood perfectly, money. 
With money, somewhere in his defenses they might 
find a weakness; seeking for it by means not un- 
practised, they found Judas, the only one of the dis- 
ciples not a Galilean. 

§ 


The compounding of Judas with the agents of 
Caiphas is connected by tradition with an incident 
that occurred on Wednesday evening at the house 
of one Simon, at Bethany, where the Master was 
being entertained at supper. No doubt Judas felt 
gulled and disappointed. Perhaps he had friends in 
the city to wag a sly finger at him. Here they were 
at Jerusalem, and no kingdom; here, after nearly 
a year of following, still unaccepted, dependent on 
the chance hospitality of villagers, they who should 
have feasted in kings’ houses! Thirty pieces of 
silver, about four months’ wages, was not much to 
one who had expected to sit on one of the twelve 
thrones of Israel, and all that they wanted of him 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 147 


was that he should guide the temple police to his 
Master when few or none were by. He could have 
had no idea what was really to be done to Jesus, 
for the Sanhedrin itself had no notion, and was 
hard put to it, once they had taken the prophet, to 
find an accusation against him which would be 
acceptable to the Roman authorities. And surely 
if the man was the Messiah, when the police laid 
hands on him he would have to declare himself. 
So Judas must have mused inwardly while the supper 
went forward and the uninvited, in the friendly 
Eastern fashion, edged up to catch some crumbs of 
wisdom as they fell from the prophet. 

And as he mused came a woman having an ala- 
baster box of ointment, very costly, which she poured 
upon the head of Jesus. Thus it was done by the 
rich to guests of great distinction; but the thrifty 
folk of Bethany were shocked at it as an extrava- 
gance. How much more virtuous to have sold the 
ointment and given the money to the poor! This 
is what is called an eminently practical suggestion; 
but the practicality of prophets is of another sort. 
“Let her alone,” said Jesus, “‘the poor ye have with 
ye always...” subject to our poor mechanical 
pieties. Once for all he ranged himself on the side 
of the generous risks of the faith which, having 
risked, finds itself set aside for distinguished service. 

“Lord,” all they who sat with him might have 


148 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


afterward said, “had we known you were to die, 
we too would have anointed thee,”’ but it is only of 
those who, knowing no more than the rest, act freely 
on the impulse of the spirit, of whom these things are 
told in memorial. Judas, who is imagined as pro- 
testing most, Judas who carried the bag for the 
twelve, and was no doubt elected to that office be- 
cause of his eminent practicality, found in the in- 
cident the touch of futility which inclined him in 
the high priest’s favor. He may even have thought, 
as is the way with the practical, that Jesus was 
prone to be feasted and fussed over, and that he 
would spur him on to his obvious mission, which 
was to take possession of Jerusalem and declare the 
kingdom. 

The next day was spent by the little company in 
retirement among the budding orchards of Olivet, 
either as a preparation for the Passover or because 
they understood that the tide of popular interest, 
which had set in their favor for a day or two, had 
rolled back in its accustomed channel. They were 
swept under by it with scarcely a ripple on the surface 
of the city’s festivity. From the walled hilltop came 
a murmur like a hive; the valleys were tremulous 
with the bleating of two hundred thousand lambs led 
up for the Paschal rite. High over all rang the sil- 
ver trumpets, the chanting choirs, the beat of mystic 
dances, all the mingled sound of Israel remembering 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 149 


his God magnificently. Processions choked the 
streets, pilgrim parties, Pilate going ceremoniously 
to call on visiting sovereignties, and these calling 
on the governor again. In the Roman circus under 
the wall there were plays and spectacles. 

The backward cast of history has warped out of 
all proportion the part that was played here by the 
man from Nazareth and his twelve. They were, in 
fact, completely submerged in the great national 
commemoration. But history has not shown us a 
more appealing humanness than that of their leader, 
yearning in the midst of jeopardy for the hour of 
exalted communion with the race that rejected him, 
even though to make sure of passing it with his dis- 
ciples, he put forward the supreme observance by 
a day. 

“With what great desire,” he said, “have I de- 
sired to eat this Passover with you.” To miss noth- 
ing of its full flavor he ventured back within the 
sacred precinct, where the arm of his enemies reached 
with power, to a room that had been reserved for 
him—by tradition in the house of Mark’s father. 
Here, when the shadow of the temple reached to 
Olivet and the seven-branched candlesticks were lit, 
he repaired with the twelve to an upper chamber to 
keep the immemorial festival of his people. 

Of this no single authentic detail is preserved to 
us except what is common to the Paschal ritual. 


150 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


That the nearness of his death and the certainty of 
being betrayed to it by one of his disciples was fore- 
most in his mind, we gather from what was recalled 
afterward, and also that this was not understood at 
the time by any of the disciples, except perhaps 
Judas. The words reported are unequivocal, but 
in the light of the subsequent behavior of the dis- 
ciples we conclude that none of the references to 
his death had yet the force of an announcement. 
Still less can we accept the personal turn which was 
read back into the occasion by Paul of Tarsus. All 
that is historically admissible is that at some point 
in the ritualistic meal, either when he lifted the 
broken bread ... (This ts the bread of misery which 
our fathers ate in the land of Egypt), or when the Cup 
of Blessing was poured, he said, “As often as ye do 
this do it in remembrance of me’’—that is to say, 
as often as ye eat the Passover remember me; a 
natural human suggestion, for he knew that he 
should not drink of the fruit of the vine again in 
this fashion. ‘This is as far as history dare go; but 
there is no reason why the believing heart may not 
go farther and stoutly assert its right to the symbol 
of a communion of spirit of which Jesus himself 
felt the need. : 
Another incident of this last supper has come down 
to us only in that second-century record to which 
reference has been made, but, like the story of the 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 151 


woman taken in adultery, making good its claim by 
its complete harmony with what he knew both of 
the man Jesus and his manner of teaching. Some- 
where near the end of the ritual he took a towel and 
girt himself, and, pouring water into a basin, he 
washed the feet of his disciples. But, Peter protest- 
ing, he said, “If f wash thee not, thou hast no part 
with me.” And the impulsive Peter, linking the act 
with the symbol of cleansing, offered himself, not his 
feet alone, but his head, his hands also. But the 
words that followed are explicit enough. “Ye call 
me lord and master and ye say well, for solam. If 
I, then, your lord and master, have washed your feet, 
ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.”” In such 
fashion the man from Nazareth completed the round 
of his teaching;—to forgive, to love, and to serve. 
. “Tf ye know these things, happy are ye that ye do 
them.” ) 

It was late when the meal was over; Judas had 
already gone on an errand more than suspected. 
The others had sung the last of the Hallel the sol- 
emn and suggestive song of Israel’s triumph: 


I shall not die but live, 
he sang, who was so near dissolution, 
And show forth the works of the Lord. 


The hour was upon them. 


152 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


There is a hint here, in the record of Luke, that 
Jesus was not at all certain that he would not be 
apprehended before he was out of the city, and that 
his motive in returning to the suburbs was to give 
to his companions a freedom of action which in 
the unfamiliar, crowded streets would not have been 
possible. It goes to show, too, that there was noth- 
ing miraculous in his foreknowledge, and that he 
drew it largely from his acute perception of char- 
acter rather than from any mysterious faculty of 
prevision. Except as he gathered it from the 
cupidity of Judas and the volatile temperament of 
Peter, he really did not know just what was about 
to come upon them. For as much as he understood 
he prepared them. Every man was to take his own 
purse and his staff, remembering the time he had 
first sent them forth without purse or scrip or shoes 
and yet lacking nothing. Anticipating the possi- 
bility of their having to cut their way out of the 
city, he advised that any man having two coats 
should sell one and buy a sword. Presently Peter 
showed him two, and one of them certainly Peter 
carried. 

The city hummed with the sounds of festivity— 
lamps lit in the upper chambers, family reunions, 
hurrying groups of belated pilgrims,—as between two 
swords the little company passed out almost under 
the temple, whose great gates would be flung open 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 153 


at midnight, by the north gate into the Valley of 
Jehoshaphat and across Kidron. At this season the 
little creek would have been at flood, frothing in its 
stony channel. There was a full, watery moon, 
and the smell of sap from the orchards. Up a little 
way from Kidron toward Olivet was a walled garden 
called Gethsemane, the place of the oil-press, to 
which he had the owner’s leave to repair for rest 
and privacy. Here the noise of the city fell off and 
there was no sound louder than the babble of the 
brook and the soft chafing of boughs. Taking James 
and Peter and John with him, leaving the others at 
the gate, Jesus advanced further into the garden, 
and when he had charged the three to pray lest they 
fall into temptation, he went about a stone’s-throw 
from them and, kneeling, addressed himself to the 
Father. 

No doubt the three obeyed the injunction; but 
the prayers of simple men are soon done. They 
prayed for their own souls and the speedy coming of 
the kingdom; then between waking and dozing they 
heard Jesus say, “Abba, Father, all things are possi- 
ble to Thee; take away this cup from me,.. .” but, 
understanding nothing of what troubled him, they 
fell presently into the deep sleep of workingmen. 

To understand anything of the travail of soul, the 
first which possessed Jesus since the Wilderness, we 
have to realize how absolutely voluntary was his sur- 


154 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


render to the occasion which was even now seeking 
him through the streets of Jerusalem. There was 
no indictment against him, and no offense except 
as he created it by his attack on the temple traffic. 
He was now outside the city gates with the eleven 
faithful, each with his own scrip at his side and his 
staff in his hand, and with at least two swords. 
Twenty minutes away in Bethany there were friendly 
folk, and all about them the hill country of Judea, as 
safe to the hill men of Galilee as his mountain is safe 
to the wild goat. And once back in their own 
country, the Sanhedrin would have had no power 
over them, and, so long as they kept to that district, 
no use for them. There Jesus might have lived, 
teaching and healing a few, and, provided he com- 
mitted no overt act against the political organization 
or the business interests of his time, esteemed a holy 
man and dying at last in the odor of sanctity. 
Nothing that we know of Jesus, however, permits 
us to think that he ever contemplated such an 
alternative. Once for all he had committed himself 
to the venture of a rational faith. He had prayed 
that death might be turned aside, but not that he 
himself should turn aside from it. What distin- 
guished him from all other Treaders of the Way was 
the close correspondence between his will and his 
perception, so that he is seen to move forward in 
his appointed path with none of the fumblings and 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 155 


hesitancies of lesser men. He had none of the feel- 
ing of moral helplessness which characterizes re- 
formers of our time. It is too much even to say 
that he chose, except as the soul is thought of as 
saving itself alive by continuing in an active state 
of choosing; inbreathing, outbreathing. He suffered 
as a man the consequences of his instinctive selection, 
but there is no evidence that he suffered indecision. 
Here in the garden his quick mind outran the oc- 
easion and assailed him with the bitterness of be- 
trayal, humiliation, and seeming defeat; the sensi- 
tive frame worked out the suggestion of physical 
anguish. So between waking and sleeping the three 
heard him say, “nevertheless not what I will, but 
what Thou wilt,” and observed that great drops of 
sweat stood upon him. All unconsciously they laid 
upon him the peculiar burden of the great, to know 
themselves even by those on whose account they 
accept greatness, wholly uncomprehended. For 
when, from what high and unknowable source, help 
had at last flowed back to him, he found the three 
still sleeping. 

“Sleep on,” he said, “take your rest; the hour is 
come.” And a little later, hearing a noise at the 
gate: “Rise up, let us go. Behold he that be- 
trayeth me is at hand.” While he was yet speak- 
ing came Judas with a detachment of the temple 
police to arrest him. They found him as by report 


156 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


the world had come to know him, contained, courte- 
ous, ironical. Said he, “Are ye come out as against 
a thief, with swords and staves to take me?” And 
again, as they bound him, “TI was daily with you in 
the temple teaching and ye took me not.” After 
that silence. 
Leas 

Too much is always made of the defection of the 
twelve, and not enough of the fact that Jesus point- 
edly turned his back on them. In the flurry of the 
arrest. one had cried out, “‘ Lord, shall we smite with 
the sword?” and Peter, without waiting for the in- 
junction, drew his own sword and sliced the ear of 
the high priest’s servant. But, “Put up thy sword,” 
said the Master, “the cup which my Father hath 
given me, shall I not drink it!” Not only did Jesus 
refuse their aid in this crisis, but it is not of record 
that he referred to them again, sent for them, left 
any message. To them the Word had been com- 
mitted; the last thing he could have wished would 
be to implicate them in his disaster. The last thing 
they would have thought of would be to act in op- 
position to his suggestion. They were children of 
the earth, whose instinct in danger is to be still and 
to keep on being still. Not knowing what was best 
to be done, they did nothing. Several of them had 
their families with them, whose safety was their first 
concern. Only Peter followed the guard afar off, and 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 157 


from him and what could be gleaned from the com- 
mon report, all our account of that night’s doings 
are derived. 

The key to the situation is to be found in the fact 
that Jesus was first taken, not to the high priest who 
had ordered his arrest, but to the house of that arch- 
grafter, Annas. The difficulty was that the chief 
reason why Jesus must be put out of the way—his 
interference with the temple traffic—nobody dared 
mention. Evidently not all the Sanhedrin shared 
or approved of the buying and selling within the 
sanctuary. Here we have a thoroughly modern 
situation: a representative body in the main well 
intentioned, manipulated by a group within the 
group, whose spring of action was illegitimate profit. 
Some indictment of Jesus must be found which would 
not only appeal to the majority of the Sanhedrin, 
but would look well before the Roman governor. 
For the Sanhedrin had for some time been deprived 
of the death sentence; the most they could do 
would be to represent Jesus as guilty of death by 
the Jewish law, and to persuade Pilate to fix that 
penalty. And none so competent to have that 
business in hand as the Sadducean Annas. Emi- 
nently safe as a churchman, not troubled by par- 
ticular scruples, wealthy, astute, he was easily the 
man to get the better of the comparatively honest 
and tactless Procurator. 


158 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


What passed between Jesus and the ex-high priest 
is not known except that Annas sent him bound 
to Caiphas; where before the hastily summoned San- 
hedrin an attempt was made by means of false wit- 
nesses to implicate Jesus in a charge of sedition. 
It was perhaps not the best charge to make before 
a tribunal hating Rome as the Sanhedrists hated it. 
Somebody was found who had heard Jesus say some- 
thing that could be tortured into a threat to over- 
throw the temple in three days and build it again. 
This was plainly anarchical, but even here there 
was no agreement between the witnesses. When 
all else failed Caiphas made his final cast; no doubt 
he had been instructed thereto by Annas; possibly 
he delayed, fearing to invite in the innermost circle 
of Israel so stirring a declaration. Made before the 
common people, it would have been answered with 
a cry, but here in the heart of the priestly aristoc- 
racy it struck offensively across every tradition of 
caste and religion. Said Caiphas, “Art thou the 
Christ, the son of the living God?” 

And Jesus answered, “I am.” 

Whereupon the high priest rent his garment as 
was proper to a high priest on hearing a blasphemy. 

“What need have ye of further witnesses?” he 
cried. ‘What think ye?’ And the elders of Israel 
judged him guilty of death. 

The while this was in progress Peter had come 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 159 


into the open court of the high priest’s palace and 
gleaned what he could among the loafing guard. 
About cock-crow a maid-servant hanging about for 
a bit of chaff with the soldiers, looked down from 
the gallery and saw him warming himself at the 
charcoal brazier. 

‘Thou also wast with this man from Nazareth,” 
she cried to him, accusingly, but he denied it and 
in the very denial gave evidence against himself, 
for one to whom the broad Galilean dialect was 
known, insisted, “Surely thy speech betrayeth thee.” 
And Peter, thinking of nothing, perhaps, but how 
he could keep on hanging about until he learned 
what was taking place behind the high palace win- 
dows, began to curse and swear, saying, “I know 
not the man.” MHardly had he finished speaking 
when far down the Tyropeeon a cock crew shrilly. 
Then Peter remembered how the evening before 
Jesus had said to him in the very moment of pro- 
testing loyalty, ““Before the cock crow thou shalt 
deny me,” and he went away, weeping bitterly. 

It was as well for Peter that he missed what was 
going on within the high priest’s apartments at that 
moment—the spectacle of the chief priests of Israel 
drawing aside their garments from contamination 
as they passed, and spitting in the face of a young 
Jewish working-man who stood bound in the palace 
of Caiphas. In the interval between this and the 


160 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


time when it would be possible to go to the Pre- 
torium with the prisoner the guard relieved the chill 
morning watch with a crude game played on the 
prophet of Nazareth. Blindfolded, they slapped at 
him, saying: “‘Prophesy! Who was it that smote 
thee?” 

In order that Pilate should rise out of bed at 
seven in the morning to hear who blasphemed the 
God of the Jews and who regarded Him, some pres- 
sure must be brought to bear, for which Annas could 
be trusted. It was important to secure both judg- 
ment and execution before the news of the arrest 
of Jesus had spread in the city, but this was not the 
first time the Sanhedrists had had their way in 
spite of the Procurator, and if all else failed there 
was the well-known capacity of Annas to make 
generous loans to his friends in the Pretorium. 
Morning found Pilate on the Judgment seat, but 
it also found him reluctant. It is even said, with 
color of probability, that his reluctance extended to 
the point of sending Jesus to Herod whom he hated, 
as being a Galilean and therefore out of the Pro- 
curator’s jurisdiction. But Herod, more than ever 
needing the public countenance, and shy of prophets 
since his experience with John the Baptist, after he 
had satisfied a coarse curiosity about the Galilean, 
sent him back again. 

The charge brought against Jesus by the San- 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 161 


hedrists was that he had claimed to be king of the 
Jews. There was a measure of guile in this, for on 
nothing was Rome so severe as on political offenders, 
but it is also probable that it was the only way in 
which they could convey to the Roman mind what 
was implied in Jesus’ announcement that he was the 
Messiah. The Christ had always been thought of 
as a king and of the Davidic line. One can imagine, 
too, a certain Jewish reluctance to have the mys- 
teries of their religion pawed over by this Roman 
hireling. 

The claim, if it had been made, was certainly 
seditious, and Pilate had the man scourged for it, 
and again he would have let him go. There was a 
custom of releasing a prisoner at this season, con- 
cerning which and its bearing on the manner of the 
death of Jesus there are many nice problems for 
scholars, reaching deep into ancient Hebrew prac- 
tice. It is enough here to state that when the 
Procurator suggested that he so release Jesus, the 
rabble who heard him, clamored instead for one 
Barabbas, a direct-actionist of that time, one who in 
a recent insurrection in the city had done killing. 

All this took place in the court of the governor’s 
palace, Pilate speaking from the gallery, for the Jews 
would not go into the house of a heathen, lest they 
defile themselves for the Passover, for they were 
the leading men of Jerusalem and an example to the 


162 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


citizens. There were present the chief priest, the 
accusers of Jesus, and certain of their following, to- 
gether with such of the idle and curious as could 
be picked up in the streets so early in the morning, 
knowing little of the affair, but taking their cue from 
the majority. But among them all, probably no 
friend of Jesus. That is why it is impossible to say 
which of the things written, if any, really happened; 
whether the governor’s wife had a dream, whether 
Pilate washed his hands—a Hebrew custom and not 
likely to be adopted by a Roman—whether that 
question, What is truth? was ever asked and went 
unanswered. Out of all these obscurities but one 
thing sounds unmistakably, it was the raucous shout 
of the mob led by the Sanhedrists, crying, “Crucify 
him! Crucify him?!’ 

“Why, what evil hath he done?” asks the gov- 
ernor, and again, “‘Crucify him!’ And Pilate, weary 
at last of the whole affair, delivered him to be 
crucified. | 

§ 


Outside the north wall of the city, going out by 
the Damascus gate, and in plain sight from the long- 
est road that goes over the Bridge, is the place of 
public execution called Golgotha. Here, about nine 
of the morning before the feast of the Passover, 
Jesus was led to be crucified, and with him they 
crucified two thieves, for it was the custom to re- 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 163 


serve one or two executions for festival times as 
an example. What had happened in the interim 
belonged to the time and the manner of his trans- 
gression; allowing for the formality of the inquiry 
and for the sending to Herod, the time of his tor- 
ment must have been mercifully short. It was im- 
portant to have Jesus out of the way before the 
terrified and astounded followers could rally to his 
defense. He went out as other malefactors, bearing 
his cross, attended by four soldiers and a few of 
the idle and curious. In front of him was carried 
a board on which was written his offense—This is 
the King of the Jews. There was a sting in this for 
the Sanhedrists, over which Pilate chuckled. “Say 
not,” they protested, “‘this is the king, but that 
he said he was king.” 

Said the Roman, “It is written.”’ He was not in 
a yielding humor. — 

There was another group in the little company 
that followed Jesus out of the Damascus gate deserv- 
ing some mention—a company of the good women of 
Jerusalem who made it a work of mercy to succor 
the transgressor. For the code of Moses was at all 
points merciful; neither crucifixion nor any other 
lingering death was allowed under it. In pursuance 
of their custom, these came now offering Jesus the 
solace of their weeping. On the cross they offered 
him wine to drink mixed with hyssop for the dead- 


164 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


ening of his pains, and though he would not take it, 
it was the sole relieving incident. 

As the day wore three or four of the women of 
Galilee who had come up to Jerusalem in his com- 
pany came stealing by the hill path from Olivet and, 
standing some distance off, observed what was done 
to him. The soldiers sat on the ground and diced 
for his garments. The crowd grew and thinned and 
grew again, for was he not accounted a prophet from 
whom even in extremity wonders might be expected? 
Smoke of sacrifice streamed out like a banner over 
Mount Moriah; clearly they heard the sonorous 
chant of the Levites and the windy trumpets. All up 
the hills of Judea showed the pale, silvered green of 
olives and the almond-orchards turning rosy. Now 
and then out of the crowd some one reviled him, 
saying, ““He saved others, himself he cannot save.” 
Toward the middle of the afternoon one of his poor, 
tortured companions cried out in agony, “If thou 
be the Christ save thyself and us.” But the other, 
“Remember me when thou comest into thy king- 
dom.” And “This day shalt thou be with me in 
Paradise,” said Jesus. So it is reported, but neither 
they that had heard nor they that wrote it were of 
the prophet’s following. 

About the ninth hour, at the time when the Paschal 
lamb should be slain as an expiation for all Israel, 
the strained frame yielded a moment to unendurable 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 165 


anguish. He cried out with a loud voice, “My God, 
my God, why hast thou forsaken me!” and almost 
immediately those nearest heard him say, “I thirst.” 
But when one more compassionate would have of- 
fered him on a sponge the sour wine of the soldiers, 
there were others who, mistaking the Aramaic 
words “Eloi, Eloi’ for the name of the prophet, 
said, “‘ Wait, let us see whether Elias will take him,” 
for they were disappointed that there was yet no 
miracle. And while they waited, with a great cry 
he bowed his head and died. 

Ordinarily the crucified are three or four days 
dying, but the approach of the Passover made it a 
defilement, according to the Jewish law, for them 
to be left hanging there in extremity. Therefore, 
about the time the shadow of the temple, stretch- 
ing eastward, reached to Olivet, the Sanhedrists di- 
rected that death should be hastened, as was cus- 
tomary, by the breaking of the victim’s legs. So 
it was done to the thieves, but when they came to 
Jesus it was not necessary, for they discovered that 
the spirit had already left him. 


Jesus saith Unless ye fast to the world ye shall in 
no wise find the kingdom of God; 
except ye kheefp the Sabbath ye shall 
not see the Father. 


Jesus saith I stood in the midst of the world and 
in the flesh I was seen of them, and I 
found all men drunken, and none 
found I athirst among them, and my 
soul grieveth over the sons of men, be- 
cause they are blind in their heart. 


Jesus saith Wherever there are... and there 7s 
one... alone, lam with him. Raise 
the stone and there they shal} find meé, 
cleave the wood and there am I also. 


Jesus saith ... and the kingdom of heaven 1s 
within you, and whosoever shal] know 
himself shall find it . . . (strive 
therefore) ... to know yourself and 
ye shal] be aware that ye are the sons 


of the Father. 


Jesus saith Everything that 7s not before thy 
face and that which is hidden from 
thee shall be revealed to thee. 
For there is nothing hidden which 
shall not be made manifest, nor buried 
which shall not be raised. 


[New sayings of Jesus from two papyri discovered at 
Oxyrhyncus, 1897-1903. Translated by Grenfell and Hunt.] 


oer uy, an a 
Le , : hb 





Vill 


OME six or eight weeks after these events, at 

the time when the feast of the first fruits of 
the harvest was kept at Jerusalem, the inhabitants 
of that city were astonished to find Simon Peter 
preaching Jesus boldly as the Christ, and him risen 
from the dead. There stood up with him on that 
occasion about a hundred and twenty true believers, 
among whom were the eleven—for Judas, when 
he understood what he had done, went out and 
hanged himself—together with Mary, the mother 
of Jesus, and James, his brother, and many who 
had been added to their company by reason of the 
rising from the dead which Peter declared to men 
of all nations, Medes and Elamites, dwellers in 
Mesopotamia and Cappadocia and Egypt, in the 
parts of Lybia, strangers of Rome, Jews, and pros- 
elytes. This was the Peter who had denied Jesus 
with oaths in the house of the high priest, who now 
preached somewhat in this fashion—how that Jesus 
had been approved of God by many signs and won- 
ders, had been crucified, dead and buried, the third 


day he arose from the dead and had appeared to 
169 


170 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


Mary Magdalene, to the eleven, and to a consider- 
able company of the disciples. Unlettered as Peter 
was, such was the faith and fervor of his preaching 
that on that same day about three thousand con- 
verts were added to the number of believers. 
Something had certainly happened to these reti- 
cent and easily shaken peasant souls to raise them 
to the plane of spiritual conviction, from which 
neither revilings nor martyrdom could dislodge 
them; something which had not only rallied them 
from the shock of his shameful death, but had clari- 
fied and fused the teachings of Jesus as the whole 
of his living ministry had not done. It had reached 
out beyond the circle of his personal following and 
convinced of his absolute Messiahship many who 
had so far accepted Jesus only as a teacher. This 
is the first unequivocal mention that we have of 
the members of Jesus’ own family among his fol- 
lowers; all that could be gathered at Jerusalem, 
filled with the holy spirit and praising God daily. 
Unfortunately, no first-hand account of the events 
which had worked this astounding revolution has 
come down to us; but something can be made 
out under the legendizing tendency of the time at 
which it was finally committed to writing. Separated 
from the suggestion of the supernatural, with which 
everything that Jesus did began very quickly to be 
colored, incidents of the resurrection show an ar- 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 171 


resting consistency with the occasion and its back- 
ground. 

It had been about three of the afternoon when 
Jesus bowed his head upon the cross with a great 
ery, and a little before sunset when, in compliance 
with the Jewish regulation, the body had been taken 
down. It had been given, at his own request, into 
the hands of one Joseph of Arimathea, probably a 
member of the larger Sanhedrin, one of those who 
had not consented to the death of Jesus, and in any 
case a man sufficiently in authority to win such a 
concession from Pilate. It was now too close to the 
eve of the Passover to admit of any proper rite of 
burial, so that the body was merely wrapped in aclean 
linen cloth saturated with spices, after the Hebrew 
custom, and laid in a new rock tomb not far from 
Golgotha. The women of Galilee, who had watched 
the crucifixion from afar off, followed and marked 
where it was laid. It lay wrapped in a cloth pun- 
gent with aromatic and preservative drugs, with no 
confining coffin, and about it played the cool airs 
of the garden. One must consider also the condition 
of the body, how that it was not broken, and that 
it had at most the marks of scourging, the nail- 
holes in the hands and feet, and possibly a spear- 
prick in the side. This is to allow the utmost to 
tradition. Of such wounds none are necessarily 
fatal, and the spear-wound does not appear in any 


172 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





but the second-century gospel, where it is related 
with curious commentary that blood flowed from 
it; but blood does not flow from dead bodies. It 
was not invariable in crucifixion that the feet were 
impaled, but sometimes the hands only. It is to be 
remembered, also, that the body which lay there in the 
rocky tomb was that of a well man of great hardi- 
hood, a man who at>the first turn of the tide of con- 
sciousness could have reached out and laid hold on 
the eternal source of healing. Whether or not we 
are to believe that the tide did so turn and bore 
him flooding back to life, there is much in the gospel 
narrative to give color to such a supposition. 

It does not come clear to us as does the story 
that was afterward told of his birth, pure legend, 
arched and sculptured into a perfect tabernacle 
wherein is laid up the choicest treasure of the heart, 
with kings and shepherds, angel choirs and lowing 
kine, to signify all that his coming meant to hu- 
manity, but lies embedded, as the fact story so often 
does lie, in all the crossing and contradictory state- 
ments of it. It is a story of a thing that was known 
to a scant score of timid and illiterate folk sojourning 
in a great city, a thing kept secret on its own ac- 
count and whispered cautiously from ear to ear in 
fear of the authorities. Finally, when it was some 
time past, blazoned as a mystery, and only com- 
mitted to writing after some forty or fifty years. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 173 


Yet still the story preserves the form of veridicity. 
It begins on the morning of the third day, as soon as 
it was light, with the women of Galilee stealing forth 
from Bethany or wherever on Olivet their camp 
might be, for it is certain that the disciples were 
not lodged in the city. They came by dew-wet 
orchard paths beside which here and there sprang 
the little low green-veined flowers, called stars of 
Bethlehem. High over them the temple walls be- 
gan to take the day upon their gilded pinnacles; 
they heard the clatter at the gates from the guard 
changing, and the hordes of market gardeners with 
their donkeys waiting to be let in. They found the 
garden which is close to Golgotha, and then along 
the limestone outcrop they followed the line of 
tombs to the one that they had marked. Accounts 
differ as to why they came, with what purpose to 
prepare the body for more ceremonious burial, and 
what happened when they had come, but agree in 
this—that they found the rock-cut tomb empty 
and the grave-cloth lying at one side. 

Two of the three went back with this message to 
the disciples, but Mary Magdalene remained walk- 
ing and weeping in the garden. And as she walked 
Jesus spoke to her, but she, thinking it was the gar- 
dener—for by this time he had got some sort of 
garment upon him—said to him: 

“Oh, sir, if you know where they have laid him, 


174 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


tell me that I may take him away.” Then he called 
her by her name: 

“Mary!” 

““Rabboni,” she answered, instinctively, to the fa- 
miliar tone, and,turning,she knew him. She would 
have kissed his feet, perhaps, or fingered a fold of his 
garment to make sure if it were really he or a vision 
of thin air, but he, sensitive from his wounding, drew 
back. 

“Touch me not,” he said, and then, reassuring, 
“LT am not yet ascended to my Father.’ Then he 
bade her go and say to the disciples he would meet 
them in a place they knew of in Galilee, and so de- 
parted out of her knowledge. 

One hears how Peter and John, when the women 
brought them word, came running and _ stooped 
down and looked into the empty tomb, not knowing 
what to make of it. And the next we hear is that 
two of his disciples, but not of the twelve, and there- 
fore not so familiar with his countenance, walked 
from Jerusalem to their home at Emmaus. This 
would have been about a week later, for so the 
feast of unleavened bread was prolonged from the 
day of the Paschal supper; and as they walked they 
talked of the things which had been done at the 
Passover. ‘Talking thus, they were accosted by one 
who inquired of them what manner of communica- 
tion they had with one another that they should be 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 175 


so sad. And one of them, whose name was Cleo- 
phas, answered him with an account of all that 
had happened, speaking of Jesus as a prophet whom 
the rulers had condemned to be crucified, “But,” 
said Cleophas, “we trusted that it had been he that 
should have redeemed Israel.” 

“O fools,” said the stranger, “‘and slow of heart 
to believe all the prophets have spoken!’ Then 
he began to show them out of the scriptures how it 
was necessary that the Messiah should suffer these 
things, feeling his way like a true Hebrew back by 
the law and the prophets, star-lighted sayings that 
shot like meteors across the shames and humilia- 
tions of the crucifixion. As he held up the events 
of the last few days to the familiar scriptures, new 
meanings came out like secret writing held before a 
flame, and as he talked the hearts of his companions 
burned within them. It was twilight when they 
approached the village and heard the cheerful bark- 
ing of the dogs and the lowing of cattle in the byres. 
There, as they drew near to the house of one of them, 
the dusk falling and the ery of the night-jar shaken 
out in a shrill spray of sound above the strips of till- 
age, they urged him to come in to supper and a bed 
with them. But as he sat at table he blessed the 
bread, according to a custom which was well known 
of him, and, putting off the covering from his head, 
in Hebrew fashion after the blessing, suddenly they 


176 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


knew him. When he perceived that he was known, 
and that they spoke neither to him nor to one another 
for astonishment, he rose and slipped away into the 
dusk. 

We hear of him again when the disciples are met 
together secretly for fear of the authorities, coming 
unexpectedly into their midst and saying, “Peace 
be to you, ...” for they were affrighted, supposing 
they had seen a spirit. “Behold my hands and my 
feet...” he said; “handle me and see, for a spirit hath 
not flesh and bones.”’ And while they wondered 
between joy and amazement, he asked them what 
food they had; and when they had offered him 
broiled fish and honey in the honeycomb, he ate be- 
fore them, talking the while, as he had to the two 
at Emmaus, of the relation of prophecy to the things 
which had happened to him and to them at Jeru- 
salem. Twice he met with his disciples in this 
fashion, and the second time he was handled by 
Thomas, who, being absent on the first occasion, had 
declared that unless he could lay his finger in the 
print of the nails he would not believe. 

There seems to have been some doubt in the early 
records whether these meetings with the teacher 
took place at Jerusalem or in Galilee; but as to the 
two meetings yet to be mentioned there can be no 
question. To Galilee Jesus would naturally have 
turned; there he would have been safest from his 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 177 


oo 


enemies of the Sanhedrin, and there in the lonely 
places of the hills, where his earliest revelations had 
come to him, he could have awaited the leading of 
the spirit. For though he could find a warrant for 
what had happened to him in scripture, there is no 
evidence that Jesus had expected this second term 
of living, or that he knew, except as it was the will 
of God, why it had come to him. It was not, as he 
seems to have realized from the first, that second 
coming of the apocalypse, in which the social order 
was to be renewed; it was the fulfilment of prophecy, 
and for whatever else it was he could wait as he had 
always waited, without hurrying God, without guess- 
ing. ‘That he should have gone about in secret was 
part of the necessity of the time and occasion, part, 
too, of his consistent plan to disembarrass his dis- 
ciples as far as possible from the implication of his 
presence. Also, simply as he had trusted their love 
for him, he could hardly at this juncture trust much 
to their discretion. That he had a refuge in the 
mountain of which nothing was known to them ex- 
cept that it was in the mountain, we have seen, and 
also that he made plans at times without consulting 
them. That he should have made his way back to 
Galilee without their aid is neither new nor strange 
in his dealing with them; in view of his extraordinary 
spiritual resources it presents few material problems. 

To Galilee, then, he seems to have gone, and the 


178 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


disciples each to his own house and calling. The 
next meeting is every way in the manner to indicate 
that Jesus waited his final direction in the hills above 
the lake of Gennesaret, somewhat removed from its 
most populous border. On a day some weeks after 
the events of Jerusalem, Peter and the sons of 
Zebedee went fishing, and with them in the boat 
were Thomas and Nathaniel of Cana, and two other 
of the disciples. They went out at even, and all 
that night they caught nothing, but when it was 
morning, the fishing-smack standing close in toward 
the shore, they saw Jesus calling to them from the 
land and directing them where they should cast in 
the nets. But when they realized it was the Master, 
Peter threw his fishing-coat about him, for he had 
stripped to the labor of casting, and waded in to the 
shore. Presently came the others, dragging the nets, 
to discover that Jesus had built a fire, and laid 
fish to broil on the coals and prepared bread. So 
they ate and talked together as they must have done 
so many times in the beginning of his ministry, 
when the shared, simple meal was all they had among 
them of the kingdom. 

In this fashion the appearances of Jesus after his 
death are set down, not other than the appearances 
of his life, except for here and there the legendizing 
touch. Of his coming and going in secret, mysterious 
vanishings are made. Mark, who wrote what Peter 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 179 


told him, says simply that he appeared while the 
disciples were at supper and upbraided them for 
their unbelief, but John, writing in the second cen- 
tury, says that the door was shut. Mark says that 
the women at the tomb met a young man there, 
Matthew makes him an angel, and Luke, writing 
hearsay only, makes two of him in shining garments. 
Such a development in forty or fifty years for an 
event which, even when it happened, was regarded as 
supernatural, is less than might have been expected. 
And then, suddenly, on an occasion which all seem 
to have recognized as final, the appearances stopped. 

It seems that there had been a preaching, some- 
where in the hills, and that more than the twelve 
were present. Paul, twenty years after the event, 
says that there were about five hundred; others 
mention simply a great company. After the dis- 
course, when he would have left them, those who 
were nearest to him in affection went a part of the 
way, and when he had lifted up his hands and blessed 
them they saw him pass from them toward his 
chosen place, of which they knew nothing except 
that they should not see him again in this fashion; 
and they believed that he had ascended into heaven. 

So passed the most singular and appealing char- 
acter in all history. The spring was at the flood, 
the barley beginning to head, and anemones bright 
as blood pricked out the paths. None saw him go 


180 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


but a handful of fishermen and villagers; Tiberius 
he left upon the seat of Rome and the eagles flying 
over Jerusalem, not a tax remitted nor a dream 
realized, not a word of all his revelation written. 
Even so he went in the same quiet confidence that 
had sustained him, more completely at one with 
the purposes of God than any man who has yet be- 
lieved in Him, and, as we admit, most completely 
justified. 


§ 


Paul, when he mentions the post-crucifixion ap- 
pearances of Jesus, says that he appeared also unto 
Peter. Of this we have no account, though such an 
interview is plainly indicated. It is indicated in the 
complete reinstatement of Peter, who denied him, 
in the confidence of the Master and respect of the 
other disciples; it is indicated in the authority which 
was conceded by the twelve to Peter, even stronger 
in tradition than in the scripture, where evidence 
of it is not wanting. More than all else it is in- 
dicated in the stout conviction of Peter himself that 
he had seen the Lord. He preached it, was scourged 
and in prison because of it, he died for it. His faith 
in the risen Christ made of him, a heavy, blunder- 
ing, impulsive fisherman, one of the chief apostles, 
preaching acceptably in the cities of the known 
world, establishing churches out of hand. 


A SMALL TOWN .MAN 181 


But of this interview Peter says nothing, unless 
it be indicated in that reference to the manner of 
his death which he says Jesus foretold him. And 
John Mark, who wrote all that he could remem- 
ber of what Peter told him, says nothing, or at 
least nothing that has come down to us, for it is 
agreed that the story of Mark has been cut off at 
the point where the women returning from the 
empty tomb were afraid to speak of what they had 
seen. It has been suggested that the true ending 
of Mark was replaced by a later version because his 
account of what Peter told him constituted an ad- 
mission of the phantasmal character of the appear- 
ance, a vision, a hallucination. 

But how if it were the other way about, and 
Mark’s story was rejected because it showed all too 
plainly a man believed to be dead, but found living 
and as a man disposing his affairs? This would 
have been the more likely if the young man the 
women found at the sepulcher had been the same 
Mark, noticed as standing by at the arrest of Jesus, 
and fleeing from the officers, leaving in their hands 
his linen garment, for tradition makes this young 
man John Mark and no other. The one explanation 
is as possible as the other; and by the time the book 
of Mark was written it was not only believed that 
Jesus rose from the dead, but many other things 
were believed about hira which were no part of his 


182 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





teachings, but were owed to Paul of Tarsus. It was 
notable that during their lifetime there were several 
things about which Peter and Paul had the greatest 
difficulty in coming to agreement. Paul, you may 
be sure, would have cut off the manuscript of Mark 
with his own hand if he thought it contradicted in 
any particular that understanding of the teachings 
of Jesus which he claims openly to have received, 
not in the flesh, but in the spirit. 

But whatever Peter said and Mark transcribed, 
there is no question as to what Simon believed on 
the first occasion of his preaching Jesus risen from 
the dead. He believed all that we have seen Jesus 
do and teach; he believed also that he had seen his 
Master in the flesh, himself and not another. He 
believed that Jesus was the Christ, and that his 
crucifixion and resurrection could be shown to be 
part of the authentic prophecy. He believed that 
the death and raising from the dead had been per- 
mitted both as a witness to the Messianic character 
of Jesus, and as an assurance to man of a life beyond 
this life which should belong to those who believed 
in him. This was important in view of something 
else which he had come to believe within the last 
forty or fifty days—namely, that the kingdom might 
be some time deferred and that many of the dis- 
ciples, himself among them, should die before it 
could be inaugurated. But with the certainty that 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 183 


Jesus was a Christ of the dead who died in the Lord, 
there was an end of all uneasiness. The last word 
as to the futility of the kingdoms of this world had 
been pronounced when they matched themselves 
against his immortal quality. 

It was not alone the conviction that they had seen 
Jesus risen from the dead, that brought the disciples 
back to Jerusalem. They came convinced that there 
were to be no more appearances until the coming 
with Glory and with Power, so convinced that not 
the vision of Paul, nor any exigency of the early 
church, nor any exaltation, gave rise even to the 
rumor of a later hallucination. They were not ex- 
pecting visions and hallucinations, but such a veri- 
table likeness as they had seen disappearing up the 
cloudy mountain. How tender and personal the 
hope was, even at this distance we can measure. 
How often they looked out along the hill paths of 
Bethany, how many times his mother started at a 
knock on the door! They came together at a set 
time and place, too consistent not to have been con- 
formable to instructions received after the event 
which had shattered their earlier expectation. Jesus 
going from them, had known what no man has with 
such certainty known since, not only the hour in 
which his passage from the life of the flesh to the 
life of the spirit was to be effected, but the sure way 
to reach back in the spirit, to the spirits of those he 
had loved and left. 

They came back, then, about a hundred and 


184 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


twenty of them,at the time of Pentecost; more than 
had actually accompanied Jesus on his first journey in 
the flesh. They came because they had somehow been 
convinced that there were to be no more appearances, 
and that at Jerusalem they were to wait for a bap- 
tism of that spirit which was in Jesus. For they had 
said to him on one of the occasions of their being 
together after the crucifixion, “‘Lord, wilt thou at 
this time restore again the kingdom of Israel?” 
And he had answered them: 

“It is not for you to know times and seasons... 
but ye shall receive power after the holy ghost has 
come upon you... and ye shall be witnesses unto 
me both in Jerusalem and in all Judea and in Sa- 
maria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.” 

In pursuance of this parting instruction they had 
come together, and finding a warrant for it in the 
book of Psalms,—for Jesus had evidently not in- 
structed them on this point,—they chose another of 
their number, one Matthias, to be numbered with 
the eleven in the place of Judas, as a witness of the 
resurrection. ‘Thus having done what they could 
to perfect the form of organization which Jesus 
initiated, they were all with one accord in one place, 
praying and waiting. And suddenly, as with the 
sound of a mighty wind from heaven, the Holy 
Ghost was upon the company, and like unto a tongue 
of fire it dwelt upon each of them. Whoever, in 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 185 


whatever cause, has received the illumination of the 
spirit will well know that sense of wind and fire 
with which it confirms its coming. Descending on 
these plain villagers and fisherfolk, it lifted them to 
the most stupendous spiritual undertaking of all 
history. 





No way 1s hard where there is a simple heart. 

Nor 1s there any wound where the thoughts are 
upright. 

Nor is there any storm in the defth of illuminated 
thought. 


Where one is surrounded on every side by beauty, 
there 1s nothing that is divided: 

The hikeness of that which 7s below 7s that which 
is above; 

For everything is above; what is below 7s nothing 
but the imagination of those that are without 
knowledge. 


Grace has been revealed for your salvation. 


Believe and live and be saved. Hallelujah! 
[Early Christian hymn. Translated by Rendell Harris.] 





IX 


VEN in his own age Jesus was recognized as a 
mystic—one to whom knowledge comes not by 

way of reason and objective sense, but by a faculty 
of inknowing. That there is such an inknower at the 
back of beyond of the individual mind, every man 
has some inkling in experience. To every devout 
seeker come certainties on which secretly his soul 
rests, irrespective of all rational evidence. To be a 
mystic is, then, to be no more than every man is, 
except in degree. Degrees in mysticism, as we 
measure them, are not so much in the nature of the 
thing perceived, as in the completeness with which 
it is clarified in the immediate mind of the percipient. 
For most men, truth mystically perceived, without 
the help of observation and ratiocination, comes 
drifting to the surface of the mind the long way of 
the subconscious self, taking color from its content 
and prepossessions, until scarcely recognizable as 
truth. Jesus was a mystic, in whom truth, cog- 
nized by the incorruptible, inknowning self, arrived 
uncolored in the immediate intelligence. But he was 
not the only man to whom such clarification was the 


norm of experience. Great artists, great scientists 
189 


190 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





and philosophers, have had such inner flashes as 
they have been willing to spend their lives in eluci- 
dating, even to die for, as Jesus died. But Jesus 
was the greatest of mystics, for what he perceived 
he could tell—in so far as people were able to hear 
it—and what he knew, he could do. He had a genius 
for mysticism. 

To be a genius is to be able to find your way to the 
goal without precept or example. It is to be effort- 
lessly possessed of the sum of ancestral experience in 
a given direction. To be a mystic is to have well 
developed within yourself, and to make habitual use 
of a faculty which in other men is but slightly in- 
dicated. Mystical knowledge may be of any di- 
mension and any material; the run of the stock 
market or the properties of atoms. But once eluci- 
dated in the immediate consciousness, it must stand 
the same test that is put to knowledge acquired by 
observation and intelligence. It must never be 
confounded with what is imagined or fancied. If 
mystical knowledge will not “work,” if it will not 
in the long run, add itself successfully to the at- 
tested sum of human knowledge, he who produces 
it is no mystic, but a self-deluder. 

Mysticism, then, is a way of life; a practice of in- 
knowing either for all the life performance, or for a 
particular department of living. A man may be a 
mystic in his religion and a fool about his practical 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 191 


affairs. Or he may be a mystic in his business and 
fool enough not to have any other religion. Most 
geniuses are mystics in some sort, but a man may be 
a mystic without any genius whatever. For genius 
is not a thing, nor a state of being; itis a process. It 
is the open path our fathers made, the skill acquired 
by ancestral experience in special directions. He 
who has genius goes straight away on that path as a 
homing pigeon through the pathless air. Many 
great mystics have become so by instruction, by 
prayer and fasting and a practice of the presence 
of God. They have no genius at all; they have 
only struggle and renunciation and great fumbling 
toward the goal. But Jesus was a genius. He easily 
knew and did what other men fumble for and strive. 
He had a genius for mystically acquired knowledge 
of God in His relations to man. He was without 
doubt the greatest mystical genius that ever lived. 


§ 


I have been explicit in this distinction between the 
genius and the mystic, because I wish it to be 
taken for more than handsome terms of appraisal. 
If Jesus were before all else a mystic, then it is in 
his mystical teaching we must look for the chief 
part of his gospel, so long, and now so avowedly 
missed. Inasmuch as he was a genius, it was his 


192 A SMALL TOWN MAN 





genius which betrayed him to the generation to 
whom that teaching was intrusted. For to the 
generality, the man of genius has always seemed 
something other than he intrinsically is—fool, 
eccentric, poseur, neuropath, god, or possessed of 
devils. Unless his genius happens to be for the ac- 
cumulation of goods, in which case he is simply one 
of the wicked. 

The genius of Jesus was for mysticism, and his 
mysticism was of the inner life of the spirit. This is 
explicit in his teaching and in every recorded event 
of his life. It is even more explicit in the life of the 
Church for as long as the tradition of his real and 
personal life lasted—that is, for about two hundred 
years. From the place that knew hin, it trickled 
freshly and the thirsty of soul drank of it, until, 
reddened by the blood of martyrs, it sank into the 
dark ages, from which it issued like a fountain in the 
fifteenth century and is now about to rise again. 

How then did it come to be lost? 

It was lost at first hand because there was some- 
thing else in the minds of his disciples that they hoped 
for, that they looked for him to exemplify and to be. 
“We trusted,” said they of Emmaus, “that it had 
been he that should have redeemed Israel.” This 
prepossession about the Messiahship and the re- 
establishment of Jewish autonomy not only colored 
everything the disciples heard; it colored, as we have 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 193 


seen, much that Jesus said. For Jesus was not only 
a genius and a mystic; he was a Jew and a small-town 
man. He was an Aramaic-speaking Jew from Gali- 
lee, where there had been free admixture of Greek 
and Phoenician blood, and there was something in 
the quality of his genius, a lift and release, suggesting 
that the path which his genius followed was not all 
trodden out by the children of Abraham. This 
variation from the marked character of Jewish 
genius, more characteristic than that of other, less 
inbred races, is the sole evidence for such an assump- 
tion, for I put no special credence in the stories that 
arose throughout Jewry some thirty or forty years 
after his death, either to support or refute a claim 
that was made for him, of divine parentage, that 
Joseph was not his father. As preserved in the 
gospels—though I doubt its authentic connection 
with the narrative of Luke—the story of his nativity 
is a lovely myth of what the message of Jesus meant 
to the simple of heart. Jesus himself never heard of 
it. But of whatever mixed blood, the background of 
his thought and his upbringing was wholly Jewish. 
And he was a small-town man. He had no books 
but the Law and the Prophets, no words, no figures, 
no illustrative anecdotes that were not small town 
in shape and Jewish in color. He was as much bound 
by these things in the transmission of his message as 
telegraphy is bound by dots and dashes. 


194 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


The realm of the mystic is that formless inner life 
in which there is neither time nor country nor Jew 
nor Gentile. Truth appearing there, appears di- 
vested of ali but its own fire, naked even of words. 
As the inknower translates such truth from level to 
level of his own consciousness, in its final passage to 
the minds of other men it crosses a streaked zone of 
communication, in which more or less modification 
takes place. Going forward on an urge toward ex- 
pression, it meets an equal urgency of expectation, 
already shaped to receive it. That Jesus, even in the 
intimacy of his personal following, was aware of this 
perilous passage, perplexed and occasionally a little 
impatient over it, we can see by the multiplicity of 
his parables touching the Kingdom; flashing his 
thought this way and that, in a hope, almost wholly 
disappointed, to find the precise shape in which 
his truth should pass to their minds and take fire 
there. “‘I have more to say, but you cannot bear it 
now.” 

We see the formless sense of obligation toward his 
message, under which all geniuses rest, take shape 
at the edge of the zone of communication, as a con- 
viction of Messiahship; and, though he never lost 
sight of the nature of the Kingdom, he was obliged 
continually to discuss it in terms of the restoration of 
Jewish autonomy. There was something in his own 
mind on that subject, something in his mind as a 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 195 


Jew, that had no part in his mystical revelation, 
which added to the confusion of the disciples on this 
point. But it was never what was in the minds of 
devout Jews of his time. From the beginning of his 
talk about it, we can see him undertaking to sup- 
plant their concept by his own, taking up the idea 
in their minds as it was from time to time offered to 
him, as a man occupied with a task for which the 
exact implement is wanting accepts a proffered tool, 
throwing it away again as incompetent to carry his 
meaning; insisting and insisting... “but I say 
unto you, the kingdom is like unto, . . .” though 
he never succeeded in giving them to understand 
just what the kingdom was like exactly. 

In this manner much of his most illuminative 
teaching was blurred, and finally lost sight of in the 
circumstances immediately surrounding his dis- 
appearance and his expected return, so immanent 
that twenty years were allowed to slip by before any 
well-directed effort was made to gather up his sayings 
and make a book of them. By this time the best- 
remembered items were those that bore upon the 
interpretation which was beginning to be generally 
accepted, about his death and resurrection. These 
were, first of all, the sayings which Matthew Levi 
jotted down in his careful, bookkeeping way; then 
there was the story which Peter told John Mark, 
Peter himself being no penman, also a number of 


196 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


other jottings and narratives, some of them possibly 
contemporaneous, and others so highly mythical 
that about forty years after his death—at any rate 
before the fall of Jerusalem—Luke collected and 
collated the best authenticated into what he evi- 
dently intended to be a complete story of Jesus and 
the rise of the Christian Church. These three gospels 
are chiefly biographical and definitely related to the 
belief that the death of Jesus was more important 
to mankind than his life had been. Finally, a fourth 
gospel, issuing out of the early part of the second 
century, which, though I cannot allow it to have 
been of John’s writing, I concede to have been of his 
remembering, dealing almost wholly with the mys- 
tical teaching. Of this character also are the sayings 
that, while they did not get into the canon of the 
New Testament, have turned up lately as items of 
belief and practice in the Church of the first two 
centuries, like those excerpts from the Oxyrhyncus 
pamphlets and the early Christian hymn slipped 
between these chapters... . 


“Unless ye fast to the world ye shall in no 
wise find the kingdom... .” 

‘Raise the stone, and there they shall 
find me, cleave the wood, and there am I 
also.” 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 197 


Nor is there any wound where the 
thoughts are upright 

Nor is there any storm in the depth of 
illuminated thought. 


But even while the hymn was being sung, the 
whole direction of thinking about Jesus, what he 
was and what he taught, was irretrievably altered by 
the teaching of Paul, himself a mystic in his own 
fashion, which was not the fashion of Jesus. Paul 
was the sort whose knowledge begins at the pe- 
riphery of the intelligence, conceived as an idea. When 
he went into the closet of the inner self he took the 
idea with him and made what he could of it by the 
help of the Inknower. What he made with his idea 
of Jesus was the Scheme of Christian Salvation. But 
Jesus when he had gone in and shut the door, having 
brought nothing with him but pure desire, saw 
God . . . as do the pure in heart. 


§ 


Jesus saw God as no man before him. He saw 
God as the father and man the veritable son; god- 
stuff in man, He in us and we in Him. But to the 
Jews God was a venerable Jewish gentleman, driv- 
ing sharp bargains for salvation, given to choleric 
outbursts in which he threw things about, felt better 
and repented meltingly, showering benefits on his 


198 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


favorites. The Jews knew God as a spirit; but to 
Jesus he was Spirit, whole and at one with Himself. 
To the Jews, God was a Judge, but to Jesus, God 
was Love. 

This is a concept which, with the help of what we 
have learned of the constitution of the universe, we 
now lay hold of intelligently, understanding God as 
energy; ever present, all penetrating energy, for- 
ever and inalienably at harmony with all that is. 
The Love which Jesus saw as the prevailing trait of 
Godness, we understand to be that active state of 
harmonization, that infinite delicate dance of in- 
finitesimals so equilibrated that if any particle falls 
out of harmony with its instant, there is no place for 
it to fall but into the harmony of the succeeding 
instant. I can come no nearer to the Jesus concept 
of God without using mystical terms such as he 
used, probably with greater precision than has 


generally come down to us... “where two or 
three are met together ... raise the stone . . 
cleave the wood ... there am [I also... abide 


in me... I am the vine, ye are the branches... . 
except ye arein me and Tin you... .” 

Jesus held this concept of God not as a definition, 
or an idea, but as a state of active awareness, as 
close to his daily life as the inside of the glove is to 
the outside. He used it; passing from healing to 
knowing and from that to foreknowing, and past 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 199 


question, though the accounts of his so doing are 
cloudy, to a sufficient control over his immediate 
material supply. But, clearly, he taught that this 
is a proper use of godness in man, and knew himself 
not an adept, as is fondly believed, but an apprentice. 
“Greater things than these shall ye do after me,” 
some of which we have accomplished. If there were 
ever a moment in his life as a man, when he found 
himself pushed off from that breast which had 
nourished him... on that cry, Eloi, Eloi! ... 
Lo, he had fallen into the lap of God. For, if I read 
aright the account of his reappearances, he came 
out of his swound completely in that mind in which 
his disciples had always found him, completely and 
knowingly at one with the universal purpose. 

Now, though it is clear in the Scriptures that this 
experience of the indwelling, all-harmonious Spirit, 
lay back of every act and saying of Jesus, it is 
equally clear that it was but dimly apprehended 
through the small-town, Jewish-colored understand- 
ing of his disciples. Of his claim to sonship they 
made a pagan mystery, and of his similar claim for 
them, a gift. “To them gave he power to become 
the sons of God,”’ by adoption, or later, by redemp- 
tion, bought by his blood. Of intrinsic sonship the 
clear concept halted for centuries along the cloudy 
zone of communication. Of God as love they gath- 
ered little more than that God loved them; he was 


200 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


b 


“like as a father.”’ They were never sufficiently sure 
that God loved people who remained outside the 
church, nor could they quite give up the idea of God 
as a Judge, though they managed to put off the exer- 
cise of that function until the end of the world. Only 
by a few saints and little children such as Jesus set 
in their midst to be an examplar to them, has love 
been lifted past the overtones it strikes out of the 
human instrument, passion, pride, possessiveness, 
jealousy. 


§ 


Knowing God as spirit, and love as the mode of 
his being, and man a partaker of God’s nature, 
Jesus also believed man to be a partaker of God’s 
powers. It is impossible to set aside the evidence 
that, in relation to the exigencies of his destiny as 
well as his daily life, Jesus lived at a high level of 
personal efficiency, and that he undertook to teach 
his disciples how to attain and sustain such levels 
for themselves. More than any man before or since, 
Jesus came teaching that the mystical is the practi- 
eal. All those high moods which had been the exclu- 
sive prerogatives of saints and prophets, he meant to 
make part of the common use and possession. Mind, 
Spirit, whatever it is constituting the fundamental 
alikeness of God and man, he established as the 
daily instrument, accessible alike to the learned and 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 201 


the unlearned. God is as free as air, and heaven as 
close at hand in a fishing smack as in Jerusalem. He 
did a healing in the course of an afternoon call, and 
forgave sins between the roast and the dessert. He 
drew—though his name people have not yet accepted 
it—all the manifestations of the supernatural into 
the field of the natural. “Do me a miracle,” said 
the fat Herod, when Jesus had been brought before 
him bound from Pilate; but Jesus did nothing which 
he allowed to be called miracles, nothing which he 
did not openly declare to be commonly possible, the 
fulfilling of a natural law. As far as he had proved 
God, he declared Him; and he knew and said that 
there might be those of his disciples who by the 
same means might do greater wonders. 


§ 


It was not because he was a mystic that Jesus left 
no succinct account of his own processes, but be- 
cause he was a genius. Great mystics of whatever 
race and speech have discovered that, after a little 
matching of terms, their states are not only com- 
municable, but that they preserve an orderly se- 
quence and are to be both taught and learned. For 
most people the process is a long one, requiring both 
learning and discipline, prayer, meditation, and in- 
knowing. But Jesus, being a genius, came so early 


202 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


and so directly to his understanding that he left no 
record of the path, probably was scarcely aware at 
first that the same genius road was not open to his 
disciples. He had no teacher, never referred to any 
book or person as having an influence on his spiritual 
life except John, the only other mystic of his ac- 
quaintance. ‘“‘None greater, no not one,” he said, 
when as a young man he stood at the beginning of 
his own realization. This, since John seems to us 
quite of the stripe of minor prophets, may have been 
the characteristic failure of genius to take its own 
measure. Or, since they were reported to be cousins, 
there might have been private communication be- 
tween them more than appears, warranting such 
an estimate. But John did no healing, and the heal- 
ing done by Jesus is too intelligently understood 
and too negligently described not to have come also 
in the way of his revelation, the genius way, rather 
rather than the way of spiritual discipline, as it came 
to the fifteenth-century saints. 

It is possible that if Jesus had come into contact 
with the group of philosophic Greeks still to be 
touched at Athens, he might have found among them 
the habit of discriminating thought, and something 
of a vocabulary by which the processes of spiritual 
healing could have been intelligently elucidated, 
as 1s being done to-day in psychotherapeutic clinics 
and psychological laboratories. As it was delivered 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 203 


to a few villagers and fishermen, all that has come 
down to us is the descriptive gesture. Jesus seemed 
to have realized both the subconscious engagement 
of the psyche of the healer with the psyche of the 
patient, and the part that suggestion plays in secur- 
ing this engagement. By a single incident of the 
demoniac that the disciples could not heal, we are 
made to know that he realized the necessity of a 
sustained state of mind on the part of the healer, 
and briefly, that prayer and fasting were the means 
used to attain that state. He was aware of the ir- 
relevance of healing to his mission, which was to 
inculcate a “kingdom” in which good health was to 
flow naturally from a right relation to God. Also, 
though he left us not a hint as to his technique, he 
showed himself acquainted with the relation of 
bodily health to psychic discord, and a normal, 
human way of dissipating one by resolving the other. 

Neither did he leave any technique for inknowing, 
which he regarded also as normal for all who were 
willing to accept it as normality. It annoyed him to 
be continually asked for signs and tokens. Just 
believe that this is true and act on that belief and 
you will see that it is so, he said. But the disciples 
did not want it so easily as that; they hated then, 
as Christians to-day, to take their religion straight, 
unclouded by mystery. ‘They were average men to 
whom genius itself is a mystery, and his genius was 


204. A SMALL TOWN MAN 


so native to him that he failed to realize the lack of 
it in others. All that he realized was that the dis- 
ciples were slow of heart, and he suffered the lone- 
liness of all great genius in their time, even as be- 
loved among their lovers. 


§ 


It was the mystical life that Jesus admonished his 
disciples to lead, as differentiated from the ritualistic, 
legalistic life of the devout Jew. 

**Know yourselves and we shall be aware that ye 
are the sons of the Father” . . . they were to abide 
in this consciousness of God within, and it was to be 
sufficient unto them in health and fortune, food and 
raiment. There was no limitation to the power of 
God in man, and therefore no concept of limitation 
was to be allowed to the sincere disciple. Likewise 
there was to be no limitation of obedience to the 
inward monitor. fPersecutions, despisings, family 
relationships, law and convention were equally to be 
set aside at every point in which they impeded the 
free play of the divine nature in man. In his teach- 
ing, no such division of personal affairs into spiritual 
and practical, as distinguishes most Christians of 
today, had any place. 

In all or any of the exigencies of human life you 
were to ask and you would receive, knock and it 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 205 


should be opened unto you. Jesus made no dis- 
tinction whatever as to the nature of these exigencies, 
whether they were of hunger, or disease, or what are 
called moral problems. 

To Jesus there was no such thing as a moral life 
apart from the life of the Spirit. The more closely 
we examine his teaching the more it appears that to 
him morals had no value except as witness to the 
Spirit, or as aids in maintaining the necessary flu- 
ency of spirit. Good and evil were not to be thought 
of as established by general opinion, nor by con- 
formity with the rules of an institution, nor even with 
a previous revelation. Acts, states of mind, were 
good or evil only as they helped or hindered that 
harmonious interrelation of God and man, within 
and without, which is the kingdom of heaven. 
Greeds of money and appetites of the flesh, anger and 
the natural affections, were to be cut off when and 
because they were found to be impeding. Lust and 
pride and anger and hatred and envy were defiling 
because they defiled, clouded, the inner life in which 
alone God becomes knowledgeable. They were not 
sins, they were simply incumbrances. There was 
but one sin—the refusal to abide in and by the inner 
revelation. 

Jesus had no moral program. All the torturing 
of the Scriptures for two thousand years, cannot be 
made to yield one that will not eventually be found 


206 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


hampering to the free flow of the Spirit. For his 
moral teaching is exigeant, fragmentary. When a 
moral question was propounded to him he met it with 
reference to his mystical teaching. Or he exemplified 
his mystical teaching with some. reference to the 
moral situation of his hearers. In no single instance 
did he reach forward and specifically anticipate the 
moral problems that began to beset his disciples 
within a year or two of his death. To problems such 
as have become of the utmost moral importance to 
our time, he remained oblivious; marriage, the 
family, prostitution, polygamy, war, and slavery. 
So far as he expressed himself at all, the family was 
inconsiderable beside the call of the spirit, and 
marriage a matter of personal disposition. For 
himself, he did not choose it. Possibly no question 
was put to him on many of these points because his 
mystical teaching was sufficiently clear, so that no- 
body could suppose for a moment that one could 
abide in the Father and at the same time be a prosti- 
tute, or practice any uncleanness. They were 
chiefly small-town men who gathered around him, 
respectable villagers with families, and they asked 
him only such questions as arose in their own ex- 
perience. When prostitutes and adulteresses were 
brought before him he found no condemnation for 
them. ‘“‘Go,” he said, ‘‘and sin no more.” 

For distinctly, Jesus thought of forgiveness as a 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 207 


function and an obligation of man toward man. 
God being love, could hardly be thought of as being 
in that state of alienation toward man, requiring an 
act to overcome. The act is man’s. And this act, 
the technique of which is modernly to find, is defi- 
nitely an act of the inner self; nothing so superficial 
as imposing no punishments upon, or cherishing no 
resentment toward, the sinner. Forgiveness is an act 
by which the sin is made to disappear out of the 
sinner’s consciousness, as disease is made to dis- 
appear. The words which Jesus used in this con- 
nection have been grossly distorted out of their 
meaning, for “repent”? does not even bear the con- 
notation with which it is commonly charged, of an 
emotional orgy of regret for what one has done. It 
means a going back to the point of starting and 
starting over again. This Jesus knew more surely 
than the modern psycho-analyst knows it, but he 
did not explain it so convincingly to the men of his 
time. Like all the great, he was least aware of his 
greatness at the points which most distinguished him 
from the generality. 


§ 


For living this mystical, but not mysterious life, 
there were rewards, not bestowed, but inherent. 
*‘ All these things shall be added unto you.”’ He had 


208 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


come to bring Life more abundant, breeding freely all 
the good things of life. Jesus himself, able as he 
showed himself to do without them, had a simple, un- 
affected appreciation of good things, suppers, genial 
social occasions, ointments, perfumes, clothes as good 
as he could afford—did not the feed and overfed 
soldiers of the Preetorium dice for them? The im- 
portant thing to keepin mind was not to allow your- 
self to become attached to these things, to be able 
to lay down this pleasant life when the call came and 
to drink your cup as it was offered. Finally there 
was the life eternal to be attained by the practice of 
the Presence of God, and in no other way. 

The idea of personal immortality had already come 
into the Jewish thought through the teaching of the 
Pharisees, thought of, not very explicitly, as con- 
tingent on a strict adherence to the law and the 
preservation of a high moral tone. But by parable 
after parable, Jesus taught a personal survival con- 
tingent on the attainment of a high level of God- 
consciousness. ‘There is not wanting evidence that 
he believed that if you attained it in the last spark 
of life expiring, that would still be enough to get 
you intact past the shock of death. Jesus could 
hardly have thought of the God-part of man as 
dying. In case of failure to carry your personality 
across, it was reabsorbed, possibly, into its source, 
but if you would be you, with all your recognizable 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 209 


baggage of personal identity, it could only be by 
keeping yourself highly charged with the Holy Spirit, 
the Spirit making for wholeness. “Except ye abide 
in me ye shall not see the Father.” 

To his name people it has always been a stumbling 
block to have survival hang upon the being of some- 
thing rather than the doing. For all our tithing of 
mint and cumin shall this thief go in before us? 
But it is always so much easier to be moral than to be 
spiritual. 


§ 


Beside the occlusion of the mystical teaching of 
Jesus, arising out of the ignorance and preposses- 
sions of his time, there was a habit of his, of speaking 
in the person of the Inknower, singularly mislead- 
ing. His opening formula, “Verily, verily I say 
unto you,” was easily allowed for by the small-town 
Jews who heard him, as conformable to the “‘Thus 
saith the Lord,” of the prophets, but proved con- 
fusing to the mixed audience reached only by the 
written accounts of his life. Neither was it clear to 
Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopo- 
tamia and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia and 
Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and the district of 
Africa about Cyrene, Romans, Cretans, and Arabs, 
that in accepting himself as the fulfillment of proph- 
ecy, Jesus had not at the same time taken on a claim 


210 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


to divinity. For among the Jews the Messiah was 
not thought of as having a divine nature, but as 
divinely appointed. 

So, and by such means, but chiefly by Paul of 
Tarsus, the word was clouded. For Jesus set up no 
claim to divinity other than he set up on behalf of 
every other man. And as for the one clear charge to 
Peter, on which his cliurch was to have been founded 
as on a rock, it was tragically mishandled. It had 
come sharply enough on an occasion in which Jesus 
showed himself almost come to acceptance of his 
Messiahship, but lacking confirmation, which Peter 
boldly supplied; as Jesus supposed, out of that inner 
light in which his own convictions took their rise. 
“Thou art the Anointed one,” said Peter, “‘the son 
of the living God.” 

And “Blessed art thou, Simon,” he cried, “for 
flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but 
my father which is in Heaven. . . .”’ and on this so 
long-hoped-for capacity which he believed he had 
discovered in one of his disciples, to discern truth 
independently of flesh and blood, he proposed to 
found his church, for only by such discernment may 
that which is on earth be brought into conformity 
with that which is above. So possibly Peter under- 
stood it, for when Paul came, claiming a revelation 
as to the death of Jesus, that it was a vicarious 
sacrifice (which may be only the longer way around 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 211 


to discovering that it was his life which was vicarious) 
—Peter, because he had no revelation of his own, 
perhaps, and perhaps because he recognized in Paul’s 
claim to inward revelation, the preferred way of 
Jesus, allowed it. 


For God so loved the world that he gave his 


only begotten Son, 
That every one who trusts in him may not 
perish but have eternal /sfe. 


The Son can do nothing of himself 

Save what he sees the Father doing, 

For whatsoever things He does 

These the Son does in like manner, 

For the Father loves the Son 

And shows him everything that he himself 
is doing, 

And he will show him greater things than 
these. 


Por just as the Father raises up the dead 
and makes them alive, 

So also the Son makes alive whom he wills, 

For the Father does not even judge anybody 

But has given judgment entirely to the Son. 


Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, 
or I am meek and lowly in heart... . 


I am the vine and you are the branches, 

He that continues in me and I in him wil] 
bear much frutt, 

Because apart from me you can do nothing. 


if you continue m me, and my teaching 
continues in you 

You may ask what you will and it will 
come to fass for you. 


[Mystical sayings of Jesus. Modernly translated and 
arranged by H. V. Vedder] 





X 


EK was a Jew and young. His country lay 

groaning under the impositions of Tiberius. 
Images of the Emperor had been carried into the 
Temple, and the eagles set over the gates of the Holy 
City. The customs were farmed, provinces milked 
dry for tribute, whole families sold into slavery for 
overdue taxes. Herod played into the hand of 
Rome. Even if the young Jew, Joshua Josephson, 
rapt in his personal revelation, could have avoided 
being touched by these things, he could not escape 
their effect on the people around him, who, out of 
despair of their ineffectualness, had turned to an old 
dream, fiercely, as men sometimes turn to drink, 
a dream of a Kingdom of the Jews re-established by 
direct action from God. First there was to come 
such a time as this under which the national spirit 
anguished. ‘Then there was to be a forerunner, a 
Voice crying in the Wilderness. After that the 
Messiah, with signs and wonders, the witness of his 
divine election, restoring all Jewry to a state of 
static perfection such as only Orientals dream of, 
not by force of arms or by social science, but by 


supernormal Power and Glory. It was a consum- 
215 


216 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


mation not to be achieved by the Jews, but bestowed 
upon them. The Great Day of the Lord. Come, 
ye chosen of my Father! 

For this is the secret insufficiency of the Jews that, 
though they produce many great ones, they have in 
no wise produced greatness. To this day they bolster 
themselves against the consciousness of lack, by an 
individual overemphasis which has become their 
name trait in the court of the Gentiles. To the last, 
their national consciousness remained tribal rather 
than eivil, never a pattern, but a people, one Jew 
added to another Jew, and these to all Jewry, of 
which the spiritual projection of ten thousand is no 
more than ten; full of loyalty and no lack of courage 
and high intellect, but never able to crystallize the 
diamond edge by which the figure of empire is 
graven. Therefore they dreamed of a society full 
born, permanently stabilized, in which there should 
be none hurt, and no more crying, the lamb lying 
down with the lion. Of all the things taken over 
from them by the Christian Church, this proved 
the most stultifying, this dream of a hand-made 
Heaven, made by the hand of Jehovah. So long as 
the church remained practically Jewish, it was 
looked for any morning. But with membership in- 
creasingly drawn from peoples who had not this 
dream in their background, from people who felt 
able, and were anxious to try, to set up their pre- 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 217 


ferred society with their own hand, the dream was 
put off century by century until finally, after a 
thousand years in which nothing of that nature 
happened, it was put off until after death, from which 
remote region it still reaches a paralyzing finger. 
There was a type of supernatural story once popular, 
in which the ghostly visitant proved itself by the 
mark of its fingers on an arm or a cheek, which 
promptly withered. Look well at every effort of 
organized Christianity to realize itself in social terms, 
and you will find the withered mark of this dead 
dream of Israel. 

But about A. D. twenty-six or seven, it was not 
dead. It was the livest thing in Jewry, hugged to 
the breast of those whose backs were bared to the 
lash; prayers for it mingled with curses on the tax 
collector. In Galilee and the parts of Syria, their 
young men talked of it as, ten years ago, you could 
hear young Jews on soap boxes talking of the social 
revolution, convinced, such was the rottenness of 
the time, that it could not be delayed more than a 
year or two. Not otherwise was the group of young 
radicals gathered about Peter, with Andrew, his 
brother, Simon the Zelot, and some others, when 
Peter, going down to the ford of Jordan to John’s 
baptism, had his attention drawn to a young man 
from Nazareth by the prophet’s commendation, and 
followed him. Afterward, in Capurnaum, they be- 


218 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


gan to be all of one company, all Baptists, full of 
hope and faith in John’s foretelling, debating noisily, 
drinking and thumping the table, calling each other 
Sons of Thunder, and such like young absurdities, 
until the neighbors complained of them. 

In this fashion, Jesus, his own revelation not yet 
wholly delivered at the threshold of conscious in- 
telligence, was committed to John’s idea of the 
Kingdom and his prophecy of immediate fulfillment. 
Though it is more than likely that a part of the 
apocalyptic speech attributed to him was taken 
over directly from John, there is no doubt that even 
after he began to preach his own revelation of God- 
in-man as the only reality, Jesus expected the con- 
summation of his gospel in true apocalyptic fashion. 

Here the nature of his revelation misled him. For 
in that ensphered inner self of the mystic, where 
truth is made manifest to intelligence, there is no 
time but Now. To all great mystics, and that means 
to the greatest among all races of men, things are 
known and declared, of which, after two or three 
centuries, people say, “They were ahead of his 
time.” By this is meant that the great man from 
any place where he happens to arise, sees things that 
cannot be seen by the generality of men until they 
have rounded several turns of the road. Every man 
who has had even a little inknowning, will have 
experienced the difficulty of projecting his inward 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 219 


certainty upon the three-dimensional screen of the 
average perception, in such a manner that it may 
assume a true relation to what, for his generation, is 
reality. Attempting to give his own revelation of 
immediate indwelling, form and identity, to so place 
it before his disciples that they should be able to 
cognize it for themselves, Jesus inevitably placed it 
in that quarter of their horizon in which they hap- 
pened to be looking, in the quarter from which the 
expected restoration of Jewish autonomy should 
come. Given the conditions with which Jesus was 
confronted, 1t was impossible that he should do other- 
wise than as, to the day of his death, we see him, 
struggling to make his timeless truth conform in 
time and place to the profound expectation of his 
race. Humanly there might have been a hope by so 
doing not to cut himself off, by refusing the figure 
of the Kingdom, from contemporaneous compre- 
hension. If he deluded himself in anything, it was 
in the degree to which his disciples understood him. 
Never so completely as he liked to feel. 

And yet never completely misunderstanding. 

That the disciples had his sanction for their ex- 
pectation of swift and far-reaching social change, is 
evident from their manner of living after his final 
disappearance, while they were still in immediate 
anticipation of another visitation, not as those to 
whom the Kingdom had come, but ad interim. At 


220 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


no time did they claim that the primitive form of 
communism in which they spent the honeymoon of 
their expectation, had been laid upon them by Jesus. 
It was assumed as the expression of a community 
of interest, and perhaps also of uneasiness. When it 
had served their brief purpose they were reabsorbed 
into their background; for though they had a dream 
and a promise, they had no technique. 

Since they were so left, without any directive 
reference to the political imposition and social in- 
sufficiency under which they suffered, it must have 
been because Jesus himself actually believed in a 
specific, apocalyptic reorganization of society—or 
that he found the whole social and political complex 
a matter of secondary importance. For it is im- 
possible to find in the gospels any ground for be- 
lieving that Jesus was ever interested in social or 
political reorganization for its own sake, any more 
than he was primarily interested in morals. He was 
interested in the life of God in man. He was in- 
terested in society inasmuch as it was made up of the 
children of God, but he failed to conceive of society 
as a thing in itself, having its own spiritual form and 
focus, a group soul, calling for a particular quality 
of illumination. Here the Jewish strain was upper- 
most. For with the Jew to this day, social effective- 
ness stops short of an adequate concept of group 
mindedness. Jesus did not even go so far in that 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 22) 


direction as the Jews who rejected him have gone 
since, and outline a shape of social fixity which 
should somehow be made to ful4ll the still missing 
capacity for psychic co-ordination which alone 
would produce a living social organism. Far from 
being, as he is occasionally credited with being, the 
author of Socialism, that modern projection of the 
hand-made Heaven of the Jews—did not a Jew 
conceive it?—he could hardly have failed to see in its 
meticulous fixity of mechanical adjustment the 
economic counterpart of that Pharisaism against 
which his doctrine of rebirth in the spirit was pushed 
out. Whatever the political frame of the Kingdom 
he looked for, it was at any rate something self- 
organized from within . . . seed in the ground... 
first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn 
in the ear. 

It is the practice of Christians, confronted with 
their failure to deduce from the teachings of Jesus 
the precise frame of political or economic organi- 
zation comformable to the spiritual content of those 
teachings, to insist that a logical working out of 
them would nevertheless produce the wished-for 
social counterpart of his personal ideal. But the fact 
is, we have in every age produced good Christians, 
and multiplied them on every hand, without pro- 
ducing anything approximating a Christian society. 
For two thousand years we have launched ourselves 


222 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


on a really magnificent scale, on every conceivable 
experiment for repeating in terms of the whole, the 
Jesus pattern, without being able to achieve the 
indispensable condition of a society that “‘works,” 
as the spirit of the Father worketh from within out- 
ward. We are at the end of all our expedients for 
creating heaven on earth by legerdemain of the 
intelligence. 

Puritanism and Catholicism are alike, so many 
turns of the screw in a direction that turns out in the 
end to lead somewhere else. Charity has come to be 
looked upon as a positive deterrent. We have prophe- 
sied in his name, and in his name cast out devils of 
graft and corruption, and they have returned bring- 
ing seven others. We have said lo, here, and lo, 
there, and we have not yet understood how the 
Kingdom of Heaven is where Jesus said it is, in the 
midst of us. In the midst of the group soul, where, 
had he been able to conceive society as an entity, 
he would have been able to find it. For, as far as his 
concept went in this direction, it was certainly that 
the ills of society should be healed by means of the 
God-powers within us. Here and now, and not as 
the fruit of some distant, indirect political action. 


§ 


Thus we can only account for the lack of social 
discernment, and the apparent contradictoriness of 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 223 


such of his teachings as may be taken as of social 
significance, by assuming that, so far as his teaching 
went in ‘this direction, it was also mystical; though 
there is no reason to suppose that he meant it to 
appear mysterious. For the mystical is that which 
being inwardly perceived, is perceived in advance of 
the capacity of man to reduce it to terms of objective 
intelligence. This is the mark of the true mystic as 
distinguished from the mere mystery monger, that | 
the mystic knows that what he now sees darkly, 
shall yet be seen clearly. If Jesus said love your 
neighbor as yourself, he meant not in a Jewish shop- 
keeping fashion, measure for measure, not even as 
one of yourselves, but in the sense of being yourself, 
undivided part of the Spirit made manifest as men, 
mankind. In this fashion we have scarcely begun to 
realize neighborliness as Jesus declared it, though we 
move in that direction by understanding that no 
part of the social fabric can be diseased, underfed, 
illiterate, morally unregenerate, without pulling 
down the whole social sum. : 

When his disciples asked him for a criterion of 
personal standing in the new order, the ready-made 
order of the Messianic restoration, Jesus said, “Let 
him that is greatest among you be the servant of all.” 
Except to the few along the cutting edge of advanced 
civilization, still a mystical saying. Among the 
class of social engineers, exponents of what goes by 


224 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


the name of scientific management, service as the 
mainspring of social organization begins to clear 
from the threshold of mysticism and take rank 
among intelligible, business concepts. But for all the 
intricate social necessities of our day, what else is 
there to be found in his sayings or in the background 
of his mind other than the reflection of a profound, 
personal ideal on the environment of a small, homo- 
geneous, first-century town? 

For he was a small-town man, and the mechanical 
construction of human society had no place in his 
cognition. His illumination, In so far as it traveled 
toward the small-town superscription of his environ- 
ment, ran true to all revelation of the Occidental 
mystics since, a movement of growth in which 
struggle is the norm... for I am come to bring 
not peace, but a sword. It was very slowly, as he 
moved about the country, that the naive faith in 
which he began his ministry, that the world could be 
healed of its social misery as he healed lepers, at a 
stroke, gave way to a sense of the task too great, as 
he saw it, from any hand but God’s. How naive he 
was, the shock sustained by his first sight of the 
temple traffic is to show. What happened then was 
so well within the Jewish tribal concept of Jehovah 
losing his temper and laying about him, upsetting 
existing conditions, that the most devout among his 
following never thought of concealing this incident 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 225 


as inconsistent with their claims for him. Is not 
‘turn the rascals out”’ still the average notion of an 
acceptable technique of social regeneration? Some- 
thing like this, as large as they were able to think it, 
the disciples of Jesus expected to happen. And 
Jesus himself expected it. But after his crucifixion— 
and this is one of the evidences of the reality of his 
survival of that incident—he experienced a changed 
attitude toward the whole occasion. Here, too, is a 
witness to the quality of his genius, for whenever 
the flame within him was brought close to the small- 
town, Jewish shell of him, the shell crumpled. 

At this point in the study of Jesus as a mystic, 
enters a possibility that, in justice to the man, must 
be set down, and in justice to the student, stated 
with the clear reservation that there is no ground for 
it, other than its logical connection with the known 
habits of mystics, and the characteristic difficulties 
encountered by them in the intellectual clarification 
of their intuitively acquired knowledge. This is the 
possibility that Jesus’ acceptance of the idea of the 
Parouisa did not originate wholly in the periphery 
of his small-town intellectuation. He may have 
been led to accept it as a symbol of a still more pro- 
found inknowing, so profound that it would have 
been only by the use of symbols that he could have 
communicated it, even to the best minds of his age. 
From his use of the symbol of rebirth to describe 


226 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


the psychological process by which the average man 
enters into fruitful relation with the indwelling 
Spirit, it is evident that Jesus himself understood that 
there must be a repatterning of the items of person- 
ality; something in the nature of what was later 
described as “‘conversion.”’ It is also indisputable 
that he never abandoned his concept of the work of 
the Kingdom in man, as a matter of growth, an 
evolution. If, then, he also accepted a symbol of 
a revolution as a preface to the growth of the spirit, 
might it not be that he had had sight, from un- 
plumbed deeps in him, of the profoundest mystery of 
the universe, the mystery of the fundamental shift 
of energy which underlies all change, the perpetual 
spark and explosion of all substance, even the 
Substance of God? 

It is easy to go too far in this direction. But among 
all primitive men are found concepts as fundamental 
as this, symbolized very much in this manner. And 
it is out of his ancestral pack that the intuitive man 
draws inevitably, the figure that stands for the source 
of his inknowing. If Jesus had had such a glimpse 
of the origin of creative change by explosion, it was 
only in the figure of the apocalypse he could have 
hoped to make it intelligible. 

It is probably unnecessary even to indicate the 
type of society such as might have been conceived 
by the man from Nazareth, aside from his reve- 


A SMALL TOWN MAN Q07 


lation; a society in which the certainty lying deep in 
Israel, that the last ears must not be gleaned, the 
last cluster gathered, nor the ox muzzled in treading 
out the corn, and the insufficiencies of the poor made 
good by indiscriminating charity, became the far- 
derived root from which sprang this new concept of 
God the Father, and men the sons of a common in- 
heritance. He was a mystic, but a mystic whose 
lamp of illumination turned inward. It lit the se- 
cret places of the heart, with a glow that warms us 
still to remember, even as its white distinctness 
shining on the issues of the heart, struck a chill 
through all but a few of his hearers. It was beautiful 
and merciless and sufficient. But it was never social 
in the sense that it illumined or prescribed for the 
complex outer ring of men in nations. In his own 
time it did not penetrate so far as to effect even the 
organization of the Syrian villages. At the begin- 
ning of the two-thousandth century we ‘are at the 
end of all reasonable pretension that in the teaching 
of Jesus we have either a pattern or a technique of 
social perfection. Fortunately, we are at the end of 
any necessity for assuming that he meant us so to 
find it. When we speak, as it is the fashion to do, 
of the failure of Christianity, we are either referring 
to the failure of an organized complex of ideas of 
which Jesus never heard—the Scheme of Salvation, 
the Redemption by His Blood, the doctrine of the 


228 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


Virgin Birth, the Trinity—or we are speaking of 
an unwarranted expectation, unwarranted by any- 
thing he ever said, that in his teaching as it stands 
we should find the technique by which the God-in- 
man should become manifest in group relations. 

Jesus was an Occidental mystic whose mysticism 
is toward the mastery: of life rather than the evasion 
of it. Considering the degree to which it was intel- 
lectually in advance of the time to which it was de- 
livered, and the extraordinary way in which it was 
clouded by Christian mythology, the teaching of 
Jesus has had more success than is common to proph- 
ets of the inner illumination. 

It began where now we recognize any system for 
the perfection of living experience, soundly should, 
with man in his relation to his source, God, Uni- 
versal Intelligence, Cosmic Consciousness, Infinite 
Subjective Mind. He expounded that relation in 
terms new in his time, and not disproved in ours, not 
so much as shaken by our utmost inquiry. In the 
areas of individual consciousness, in which he mani- 
fested his powers, we have made not so much prog- 
ress as he foretold, but,definitely the same kind of 
progress. We do, in the clinics of the neuropath and 
the psycho-analysts, and sometimes even in the 
churches, heal sickness, forgive sins, loose and bind. 
We have perfected his technique in these fields, 
made it communicable. Individually we have gone 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 299 


far with the technique of conquest over the personal 
environment. It is a commonplace to cure oneself 
of poverty and social misplacement by no other 
means than the spirit of truth and brotherliness 
working their lawful occasions. Jesus 3s still, for all 
personal exigencies, the best examplar of a man 
working harmoniously with his destiny, refusing 
nothing, repenting nothing, losing no ground. 

On the whole, his concept of the experienceable 
universe has had a larger share of acceptance, and 
maintains itself in the thought stream longer, than 
the concepts of the intelligible universe predicated 
by Plato and Aristotle. The corner stone of his 
mystical knowing, the oneness of the nature of God, 
conceived as Spirit, and man the projection of that 
Spirit into the world of sense, has become the head of 
the foundation of modern science; spirit and matter, 
energy and form, one substance, not denied by Jew 
nor infidel nor any other persuasion. 

As for our obstinate hope to find in his teachings, 
the still more obstinate futility of our attempt to 
make out of them an adequate frame and technique 
of group relationship, it is disappointed chiefly by 
our refusal to accept one item of that teaching which 
was never absent from his own mind, the knowledge 
of the incompleteness of his revelation. He knew 
and he said, not only that there was that which, 
because of their human limitation could not be com- 


230 A SMALL TOWN MAN 


municated to his disciples, but that there was more 
to be revealed. Except that he believed that this 
further revelation as to the activity of God in society 
would come in his lifetime, he knew and pretended 
nothing. There were also moments when it was in 
his mind that he should, in his person, be the bearer of 
that revelation—Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly!— 
and at other times he thought only that it would 
come by that inknowing spirit which was in him. 
But at all times he knew, and nothing so makes for 
the validity of what he did teach, as this clear cer- 
tainty that his teaching was not only incompletely 
incommunicated, but that it was in itself uncom- 
pleted. Herein he takes rank and precedence among 
the world’s other great. For two thousand years 
it has been overlooked that the recorded life of Jesus 
ended, not on the cross, but on the mountain. 


THE END 





Important New Books 


CHAOS AND A CREED 
By JAMEs PRICEMAN 


This is the moving and beautiful record of a personal religious 
experience, in which an inspiring creed was reached step by step in 
a pilgrimage toward the truth as one man saw it. “James Priceman” 
is the pen name of an author distinguished for books in a totally 
different field. 


A SMALL TOWN MAN 
By Mary AUSTIN 


This extraordinary book is a restatement of Mrs. Austin’s “The 
Man Jesus,” published in 1915. Because at that time the terms of 
mysticism and genius were so little understood by American readers, 
Mrs. Austin’s real conclusions were held in abeyance. In this revised 
edition she has added new and arresting chapters to her original 
book, giving a portrait of Jesus, the small-town mystic—a portrait 
that is at once challenging and beautiful. 


THE CREATIVE SPIRIT 
By RoLtto WALTER Brown 


A timely and invigorating discussion of the forces that are stifling 
the creative spirit in American life today. Mr. Brown, not content 
to inveigh with brilliance and with wisdom against the mechanical 
and deadening influences in the present standardization of education, 
art, science, and religion, also shows how they may be overcome and 
life freed of their restrictions. 


HARPER & BROTHERS 
Publishers Since 1817 


See HARPER’S MAGAZINE for Announcements of the 
better Schools and Colleges. 





Distinguished Books 


THE WAYS OF LIFE 


By RicHarp SWANN LULL 
Professor of Paleontology, Yale University 


Here, for the first time in a popular book, is the evidence for 
evolution brilliantly presented for those who wish to understand the 
facts of the origin of man. 


THE CREATIVE SPIRIT 
By Rotto WALTER Brown 


A timely and invigorating discussion of the forces that are stifling 
the creative spirit in American life today. Mr. Brown, not content 
to inveigh with brilliance and with wisdom against the mechanical 
and deadening influences in the present standardization of education, 
art and science also shows they may be overcome and life freed of 
their restrictions. 


CONCERNING THE NATURE OF THINGS 
By Srr Wir.ttAM Brace, K.B.E., D.Sc., F.R.S. 

This book is the very latest word on the most spectacular achieve- 
ment of recent science—the laying bare of the structure of the atom. 
Here is a presentation for the general reader which gives him a 
thorough understanding of, first, the atom itself, and then the 


increasingly complex molecular forms exhibited by gases, liquids, 
and finally crystals. 


HARPER & BROTHERS 
Publishers Since 1817 
New York 


See HARPER'S MAGAZINE for Announcements of the 
better Schools and Colleges. 








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